Catfight!

By Richard Zoglin

No one reads any of us," laments Lillian Hellman in Imaginary Friends, Nora Ephron's new play about the literary feud between Hellman and Mary McCarthy. To be sure, these two writers are remembered at least as much for their spoken words as for the ones they put on paper. Hellman, the playwright and longtime leftist, made a famous show of defiance before the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." McCarthy, an essayist and novelist who couldn't abide Hellman's politics or penchant for mixing fact and fiction, offered a put-down for the ages on TV's Dick Cavett Show: "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Ephron has imagined the two of them (Swoosie Kurtz, brittle and snappish as Hellman; Cherry Jones, elegant and withering as McCarthy) meeting in the afterlife, railing at each other anew. "I ruined your third act!" exults McCarthy. "I was your third act!" retorts Hellman. Ephron's play, alas, has two acts full of distractions and gimmicks. There are childhood flashbacks that force grown actresses to talk like widdle girls. The literary men in their lives (Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv) are trotted on and off the stage like stuffed dummies. There are actual stuffed dummies too--a cutesy stage device that wears thin quickly--and songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia. The depths of pointlessness are reached in a vaudeville-style number featuring Frankie Fact and Dick Fiction, which tells us nothing about either. Hellman and McCarthy might yet agree on one thing: what this play needs is Roger Rewrite. --By Richard Zoglin