She Made Friends With Death : Catherine Butterfield wrote ‘Joined at the Head,’ a play about a brave friend dying of cancer. But that wasn’t enough. She then decided she had to play the friend. It turned out to be good therapy and, incidentally, a hit

Actress Catherine Butterfield was on tour with a play in Boston and decided to give an old boyfriend a call. They chatted for a while, and he invited her over to meet his wife, then seriously ill with breast cancer.

The two women, both in their late 30s, bonded fast.

“She was one of those women you meet and like instantly,” Butterfield explains. “I had just met her, but something about her made me feel I knew her for a long time. And the stakes were dramatically heightened by the fact she was dying.”

Butterfield, who is also a playwright, couldn’t start writing about the evening fast enough. At first it was cathartic, helping her sort through a very emotional encounter. But soon she was transforming that experience into theater.

She turned out a first draft in three weeks, and several months and rewrites later, her play, “Joined at the Head,” premiered at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club, in October, 1992. The award-winning drama, which is onstage at the Pasadena Playhouse through Feb. 20, depicts how a new friend’s illness affects the life and times of an emotionally guarded, wisecracking novelist.

Butterfield’s tale chronicles the unusual and intense friendship that develops between single novelist Maggie Mulroney, and Maggy Burroughs, the dying wife of Mulroney’s former boyfriend Jim Burroughs. As much about life and vitality as about sickness and death, “Joined at the Head” follows the three friends from the two women’s initial meeting through and beyond Maggy Burroughs’ death.

But Silver Lake-based Butterfield wasn’t content to write her story and leave it there. She also chose to play one of “Joined at the Head’s” three principal characters. And her choice was not the role of novelist Mulroney (played in Pasadena by Robin Pearson Rose) that is so much modeled on her own experience. Rather, it is the role she created in New York--Maggy, the dying wife of Jim (played here by Jeff Allin).

“I wanted to play the muse,” Butterfield says matter-of-factly. “No one else who could play the part knew her. I wanted to communicate her essence and felt it would be very difficult to explain her. Maggie Mulroney was more open to interpretation because she was an amalgam of people.”

But there was more to it. “The traps are lying all over the place with the Maggy Burroughs role. The temptation to go for pathos or pity or try to make her some kind of angelic, long-suffering martyr figure is very strong.”

The dying wife was also the smaller of the two roles, and Butterfield was, after all, the author of a new, untested play that might need rewrites.

“The amount of work you potentially do the first time a play is produced could be enormous,” says Pamela Berlin, who directed the play in both New York and Pasadena. “If either the writing or the acting had to suffer, I was much more concerned she (first) get the play up to where it had to be.”

The play is complicated structurally, full of flashbacks, asides to the audience and even replays of scenes from different characters’ points of view.

“There were many nights she was up for hours working on rewrites,” Berlin says, “but she was really able to separate herself. When she was onstage, I know her writer’s mind was going, but she could allow herself to become the character.”

Butterfield, a professional actress for 20 years, has been trained to do that. When the play was first read at Manhattan Theatre Club, in fact, Artistic Director Lynne Meadow recalls, “I thought the woman reading the part of Maggy was wonderful. I asked who it was, and they said, ‘That’s the playwright.’ ”

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Butterfield was back on a New York stage last fall for the WPA Theatre production of her play “Snowing at Delphi,” and she is the first to admit she’s usually writing parts she would enjoy playing. Like everyone from Harold Pinter to “A Bronx Tale’s” Chazz Palminteri, Butterfield knows the value of writing herself a good part.

As a 40-year-old woman, Butterfield also knows that good parts for women over 30 are rare: “I know so many talented women who are out of work and I know so many not-very-talented men who are working a lot, and I find that really appalling.

“I write to purge myself. But I also write to create good roles, honest roles for women instead of the usual panoply of bimbos and mothers. I know women who consider themselves lucky to be playing somebody’s basically characterless mother on TV when they are worthy of so much more.”

It no doubt helps to be as attractive, self-assured and outgoing as Butterfield. It probably also helps to be raised in a media-aware family; her father managed different CBS affiliate stations around the country, and her mother is a former playwright, radio writer and TV talk-show host currently affiliated with San Diego Magazine.

Butterfield, the oldest of five children, started writing plays in second grade and would enlist family members for performances in the garage or basement. New York-born, she lived long periods in Massachusetts and Minnesota, has a degree in theater from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and did stints with California Actors Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before winding up back in New York.

She was doing well with her acting career in New York when, in 1983, she came down with hepatitis. During her six-month recuperation, she picked up a pen and yellow pad and started to write.

“I couldn’t act and had all these juices that needed to flow,” she explains.

She sent that first play off to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s prestigious National Playwright’s Conference. It wasn’t selected for a reading, but it did make the finals. “I took it as an encouraging sign,” Butterfield says, “and thought I should keep going.”

If she had any doubts left, reception to “Joined at the Head” should erase them. New York Magazine’s John Simon called it “an incontestable achievement,” and other critics generally predicted good times ahead for Butterfield. Last fall she received Newsday’s George Oppenheimer Award, given annually to a writer making an initial New York bow and awarded in prior years to such writers as George C. Wolfe and Beth Henley.

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Butterfield was also ready for this breakthrough play when she ran into Kathy and Peter, the Boston couple she identifies only by their first names. She had joined the touring production of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” in 1990, understudying the lead character at Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre and elsewhere, to stock up both money and free time to write plays. She brought along her portable computer.

It is clear talking with Butterfield that Kathy and Peter were far more than muses. Asking if the interviewer would like to see what they looked like, for instance, she immediately produces a photograph, and the photograph remains close at hand, propped up against a vase throughout the entire visit.

“Joined at the Head” closely parallels her own relationship to the couple during the last few months of Kathy’s life. Portions have been imagined or altered for dramatic tension, she says, but the basic main structure is true.

She tried to be particularly faithful to the character modeled on Kathy. Aside from dropping Kathy’s Boston accent, Butterfield says, she wrote her character much as she perceived her, from her bright, colorful wardrobe to her bravery and humor in such an unfunny situation.

Her novelist-narrator Maggie Mulroney, she says, is “partly me, partly my speculations about successful women like Wendy Wasserstein and partly all my girlfriends who don’t have men in their lives but have careers. That’s where I came up with the idea of her being kind of a lonely outsider who meets these people and is affected by them deeply.”

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Much of “Joined at the Head” is drawn from Butterfield’s experience, of course, including a riotous depiction of a pompous TV talk-show host. She was writing away in her Boston hotel room when a cable interview with Wasserstein came on TV.

“I had been sort of fascinated with her, this successful writer who seemed kind of lonely in some ways,” Butterfield says. “I think some of her bled into the play.”

(Wasserstein, who was also a judge on the Oppenheimer Award, says she enjoyed that scene in Butterfield’s play and considers her “a playwright with a great deal of promise because she is both witty and humane. Also, she’s able to treat a tragic subject with humor, which is very difficult to do.”)

“Joined at the Head” evolved through several readings, including one in a Washington, D.C., hotel room during the “Heidi” tour, another at the New Voices playwriting program at Los Angeles’ Matrix Theatre and, eventually, at Manhattan Theatre Club. Hearing in Butterfield “an interesting new voice,” MTC’s Meadow booked the play for a full production.

Commitment from a major New York theater put Butterfield in a quandary: how to tell her friends she had turned their lives into theater and was already speculating on Kathy’s death.

“Kathy was a nurse and knew her prognosis; the cancer had reached her vital organs,” she says. “But it felt kind of presumptuous, which is why when they said they were going to do the play, I was thrilled and terrified at the same time.”

She also wondered when to tell her friends. So when Peter was dancing with her at her October, 1991, wedding to agent Larry Corsa in New York, “I thought, ‘This is the moment,’ and I told him.” Both members of the couple read the play and, she says, “Kathy called to say, ‘You got everything right. You told the truth.’ After we hung up, I burst into tears.”

The play was postponed once, which worried Butterfield. Kathy was “failing fast” and had a goal of getting to New York to see the play.

Kathy, who made it to previews, died eight weeks later on the show’s closing day. “It sounds like hubris,” Butterfield says today, “but I really felt our play was keeping her alive.”

In fact, she says, it was difficult for her to play in the show again in Los Angeles, particularly repeating her role as the dying wife. She says she had hoped to play the larger role of the novelist this time out but was convinced by Pasadena Playhouse producers to reprise her New York performance.

“It was so meaningful the last time, so supercharged,” says Butterfield, her eyes filling with tears. “Now that she’s gone, it’s more difficult to play her with the same hopefulness, and I sometimes go home very depressed.”

It probably helps that she’s written a sequel of sorts. The Manhattan Theatre Club commissioned “The A.V. Man,” a drama that follows Jim’s life after his wife dies. The play, which MTC is considering for next season, opens with a grief-therapy group session but is less tied to real events than is “Joined at the Head.”

Not one to waste an experience, Butterfield has also started work on a new play that came indirectly from her publicity efforts on “Joined at the Head.” After her mother started questioning remarks Butterfield made in the Village Voice about growing up with Hedda Gabbler, the playwright thought it might be interesting “to rework ‘Hedda Gabbler’ as a woman trapped in suburbia in the ‘50s.”

Meanwhile, she’s not about to give up acting: “I know there’s much more demand for good writers than for good actresses, but I don’t want to give acting up, because it’s so satisfying. So if I can do both, I’d consider myself the luckiest of women.”