‘Round Trip’ and ‘Woman’: They’re Still Family Affairs : Theater and TV: Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey will be ‘standing in’ for her late husband when his play premieres, and in a miniseries based on her novel, she’s played by their daughter.

Shakespeare and Proust may have waxed lyrical about the “remembrance of things past,” but novelist Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey and her late husband, playwright Oliver Hailey, looked for ways to bring it back on the page and stage.

The author of the 1978 bestseller “A Woman of Independent Means,” a work based on her own family history, Forsythe Hailey is also responsible for several other semi-autobiographical books. Similarly, her husband of 33 years penned many plays based on his own youth and later experiences in the theater.

But the two writers shared more than a life together and a penchant for recycling their own pasts. As Forsythe Hailey puts it, “He was always my first and best editor, and I think I was his.”

So it seems only natural that, two years after the prolific dramatist’s death at age 60, Forsythe Hailey would keep the collaboration going. She’ll be “standing in for the playwright” as his comedy “Round Trip” premieres at the Ventura Court Theatre, opening Friday.

Coincidentally, her novel is about to crop up as a six-hour miniseries. “A Woman of Independent Means” stars Sally Field and airs on NBC beginning Sunday. The supporting cast includes Ron Silver and Charles Durning.

“It’s a miracle of timing that they’re happening together,” says Forsythe Hailey, 56, speaking from the Studio City home she shares with her late husband’s 90-year-old mother and brother, who’s disabled from polio. “Oliver and I are facing the world hand-in-hand again.”

They first met when both were young reporters at the Dallas Morning News. They were married in June, 1960, while he was a student at the Yale School of Drama, and they moved to Los Angeles when Hailey’s play “Who’s Happy Now?” was produced as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s inaugural season in 1967.

“Round Trip” was inspired by the experience of what became Hailey’s final Broadway play, “I Won’t Dance.” Centering on three actors rehearsing a play within the play, the comedy, says Forsythe Hailey, is about the “drama that goes into the making of the drama.”

Hailey penned most of “Round Trip” in the months between the Buffalo, N.Y., tryout of “I Won’t Dance” and its Broadway engagement in 1981, where the show opened and closed in one night. It was Hailey’s third play to last only one night on the Great White Way.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a happy experience. “Although he kept writing, after the failure of ‘I Won’t Dance’ on Broadway, Oliver really lost heart and his faith in the theater,” says Forsythe Hailey.

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It may even have had something to do with the onset of the playwright’s illness. “Who knows, with the mind-body connection . . .,” muses Forsythe Hailey. “I never really know which comes first.”

Hailey suffered from Parkinson’s disease for 10 years prior to his death, ultimately of liver cancer, in 1993. In the months following his death, Forsythe Hailey, working from the playwright’s notes, “put the play in its strongest form.”

It was a process of grieving as well as creativity. “Sitting at the word processor, he was just so present for me as I did it,” she says.

She had wanted to stage “Round Trip” last year, but had to postpone the project when her mother was hospitalized following a stroke. Now that the project has at last come to fruition, Forsythe Hailey says she’ll be “standing in for the playwright.”

Meanwhile, “A Woman of Independent Means,” the epistolary novel based on the life of Forsythe Hailey’s own Texas grandmother, Bess Walcott Kendall Jones, has been slowing wending its way to the small screen.

“It was optioned by CBS when it was published (in 1978),” she says. Later, Universal optioned the work, but Forsythe Hailey wasn’t satisfied with the script and abandoned that project.

In 1984, Forsythe Hailey adapted her book, which spans the years from 1899 to 1968, into a one-woman play starring Barbara Rush. It toured and eventually went to New York, where it was not well-received.

The author had hoped for a PBS or cable version. “But when we failed to get it done on PBS and (miniseries producer Robert) Greenwald called shortly after Oliver died in 1993, the time seemed right.”

Forsythe Hailey is pleased with the production, which has, in typical Hailey style, been something of a family affair. Their daughter Brooke, 24, appears in the role of the granddaughter Betsy--that is, her own mother--in the miniseries. (Another daughter, Kendall, 28, is also an actress and writer.)

“ ‘A Woman of Independent Means’ is a more traditional saga than ‘Round Trip,’ but between the lines you see a lot about how you make a family in both of them.”

Above all, says Forsythe Hailey, it takes being able to put grief and other trials in perspective. “I keep remembering what Oliver wrote in (his play) ‘For the Use of the Hall,’ ” she says. “ ‘Take a hard look at life, at all of it, and be grateful for the use of the hall.’

“The day Oliver died, (the) poster (for that play) fell off the wall, so I had to look at it just minutes before he died,” Forsythe Hailey continues. “I really felt those were his last words. Whenever I get discouraged, I think of that.”

* “Round Trip,” Ventura Court Theatre, 12417 Ventura Court, Studio City, Friday-March 26, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., $17-$20. Information: (213) 660-TKTS.

* “A Woman of Independent Means” airs on NBC, beginning Sunday.