Love-hate relationship

Cherry Jones and Swoosie Kurtz are sprawled in the VIP lounge for deep-pocketed supporters of the Old Globe Theatre, and quite an irresistibly cushy lounge it is. Clearly the San Diego theater’s big donors get more for their money than just good seats and goodwill, judging from the plump eggplant and ruby cushions singing their siren song to Jones and Kurtz. Suddenly, they’re horizontal.

It’s like that with Cherry and “Swoose,” as Jones calls her co-star in “Imaginary Friends,” Nora Ephron’s new play about playwright Lillian Hellman and novelist Mary McCarthy that opens on Broadway on Dec. 12. The two Tony winners are such fans of each other’s work and humanity that they can relax completely together. So there’s simply no reason to sit up.

At the moment, Jones seems as if she’s morphed into liquid, she’s given so much to the matinee performance that ended minutes earlier. She’s poured onto her left side so her cheek presses into a velvet-covered bench, and she’s talking about the ritual she and Kurtz fell into during the show’s October run in Southern California. At first it sounds suspiciously like a rite of passage performed in lock-step by numerous captains of the entertainment industry -- Mondays at Morton’s.

But take five. Not that Morton’s.

“We go to this steakhouse every Monday night to get our iron supplement,” says Jones, pulling her right heel toward her behind. “We eat these unbelievable amounts of meat together. Meat and vodka. And we’re both convinced that if we wander away from that....”

Kurtz finishes her sentence: “We’ll have to find a place in New York.”

“Otherwise,” says Jones, 46, “we’ll just be little wilting lilies.”

Here’s the good news: The two stars of “Imaginary Friends” -- who, fear not, are no wilting lilies -- get along fabulously well. So if the show enjoys the long run indicated by its glowing out-of-town reviews -- “The two stage veterans prove superb,” Sean Mitchell wrote in The Times -- the experience will be pleasant for everyone involved, which is no small thing.

And here’s the bad news: The two stars of “Imaginary Friends” get along fabulously well, unlike their characters in the “play with music.” “Imaginary Friends,” which features Broadway veteran Harry Groener as the men in their lives, imagines the two adversaries together in death -- hell, actually -- as they rarely were in life, divided by their opposite natures: McCarthy was beautiful, Hellman, plain; McCarthy grew up a Catholic orphan abused by an uncle, Hellman was raised in a prosperous Jewish home; McCarthy was a stickler for the facts, while Hellman wove sumptuous fictions and called them memoirs.

In fact, Hellman’s memoir “Pentimento,” which was made into the film “Julia” starring Jane Fonda as Hellman, turned out to be a fabrication based on another woman’s experience going behind enemy lines to help a friend in the anti-Nazi resistance, and the play supposes how a courtroom confrontation between Hellman and McCarthy might have gone.

The play climaxes with Hellman’s libel lawsuit against McCarthy for assailing her on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1980 with the memorable quote: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman died before the case could be tried, leaving McCarthy to remark witheringly, “I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court.”

When Jones and Kurtz are onstage portraying two women whose mutual enmity reached historic proportions, they really have to work at hating each other. Not that there aren’t techniques for that. They just don’t particularly want to show you the man -- woman, actually -- behind the curtain.

“That was hard for both of us,” says Kurtz, 58, “because we’re both basically very loving and very positive people....”

“Who would go to China and back to avoid a conflict,” says Jones with a throaty laugh.

“We probably shouldn’t talk about things we use to ignite and incite our juices to get us going,” says Kurtz demurely as she sits up and leans back into the purple cushions. “We all have our things, our little demons, whether they’re jealousies or insecurities or angers, rages, whatever. It’s just a question of degree,” she says, between getting slightly angry “at somebody who takes a parking place and being Medea and gouging out somebody’s eyes.”

Jones gets her McCarthy on in part by visualizing Hellman where Kurtz stands. “I have my substitutions that I’m struggling to work on to get them to the heights they need to be for this,” she says.

Indeed, the performers bond with their characters at least as much as they bond with each other, so at certain points it’s difficult to tell who’s who, even offstage. Jones refers to Kurtz as “you” when she’s really trashing Hellman. And Kurtz heartily defends the acerbic playwright, whom she met 20-odd years ago, even while admitting that she too once “bought ‘Julia’ hook, line and sinker.”

Jack O’Brien, the Globe’s artistic director who directed this production, is thrilled with the pair’s thrust and parry. “The chemistry is just brilliant between them,” he says. “There is, for people who admire each other, a natural disinclination to show the blood-sport tendency. But now since they’re so secure as friends and they like acting together, there’s a certain relish in it. It’s like great tennis: You want someone who can hit the ball back -- that’s part of the exhilaration -- and they’re beautifully matched in that respect.”

A different duo envisioned

It’s slightly ironic that a play about two women who competed viciously works precisely because they’re portrayed by two women who don’t. And yet Jones and Kurtz weren’t the initial duo envisioned for the parts. Jones, who won a Tony for her performance in the Lincoln Center revival of “The Heiress” (which came to L.A. in 1996), was an early recruit. She played McCarthy in a couple of New York workshop readings earlier this year with Christine Baranski as Hellman. O’Brien had worked with Jones in a San Diego production of Tina Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing” that moved to New York four years ago, and he was keen on a rematch. What’s more, the play’s organizers were struck by the actress’ physical resemblance to McCarthy.

As for Baranski, family problems prevented her from joining the cast in San Diego, O’Brien says. And then serendipity took over -- O’Brien ran into Kurtz at the opening of the “Mornings at Seven” revival in New York. He’d crossed paths in the past with the double Tony winner (“Fifth of July” in 1980 and “The House of Blue Leaves” in 1986), although they’d never worked together. But when O’Brien spotted Kurtz in the back of the theater, he suddenly thought, “Wow. There’s a great idea.”

“These women are very contrasting,” says O’Brien, whose recent credits include the Broadway smash “Hairspray,” “The Full Monty” and Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love,” about another literary figure, A.E. Housman. “Swoosie is petite as, in fact, Miss Hellman was, and Cherry is tall. And Swoosie has a wicked sense of humor. By that I mean she’s one of those people who assembles her fusillade of weaponry very, very carefully. Also, this is an actress who has been away from the stage in the last few years. She’s done an enormous amount of film and TV, and we’ve missed her.”

“Imaginary Friends” turns out to be about a certain generation of women on several levels. Certainly for the actresses, the play offers a rare opportunity to portray extremely complex, women “over 14,” as Kurtz puts it, both in leading roles.

And perhaps it took another woman over 14 at the peak of her creativity and power to fill a stage with her own kind, although Ephron, a recovering journalist who wrote and directed “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” didn’t set out to launch her maiden voyage as a playwright. Her inspiration came from a couple of biographies of McCarthy as well as her memories of Hellman, whom she’d met years ago.

“One of the things that’s delicious about these women is that they’re such a Rorschach because everyone I know who knew them tells the story of their enmity in a completely different way, depending on who they are,” Ephron says. “Some will tell it all in terms of jealousy, some in terms of politics, some in terms of women, and I can tell you a version based entirely on sex. And then there’s the question of what they represented in the lawsuit, the fact versus fiction of it. So for me they were the gift that never stops giving.” But if middle-aged, female protagonists are a rarity on stage, consider their visibility in Hollywood. “Someone said, ‘It’s a play,’ ” Ephron recalls. “It’s so dramatic, and it’s about two older women. Who’s going to see a movie about two older women? No one.”

Equally pressing was the paradox of Hellman’s and McCarthy’s relationship: Though both figured so hugely in each other’s lives that they took up a chunk of their respective obituaries, the women barely knew each other.

“You couldn’t possibly have made this a movie in that they were never together,” Ephron says. “It would have to take place in some reality, and reality is not your friend when it comes to this story because there were at most two, maybe three meetings. And we don’t really know anything that happened at any of them except that they loathed one another, and that’s over a 40-some-odd-year period. So what’s the shape of the movie?”

‘A play with music’

Because of or despite the fact that Ephron is new to the stage, she easily dispenses with theatrical conventions. She blasts away the fourth wall, so her characters direct many of their barbs to the audience -- as well as to props, which may suddenly drop from the ceiling. And she leavens what is essentially a dialogue by inserting musical numbers that serve as a Greek chorus and yet don’t turn the play into a musical, in part because they don’t move the action forward. Ergo, the description: “a play with music.” O’Brien calls the song-and-dance numbers composed by Tony winner Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”) merely “a sorbet between courses at dinner.”

“What is thrilling,” he says, “is she has no fear.”

She may be the only one. Stage veteran Kurtz says she was attracted to the complex role of Hellman precisely because of her fear. “I had no idea if I was going to nail it or not,” she says, “but when you get to this point that we’re at in our careers, if somebody comes along with something that’s easy or it’s a part you’ve done before or it’s just going to be fun, you’ve got to say no, because it’s not challenging. Unless it’s really kind of terrifying, what’s the point?”

Jones’ fear of Ephron used to be far more personal, a fact she now merrily recounts. Her terror of Ephron’s image was dispelled several years ago by an audition for a “You’ve Got Mail” part she didn’t get. “I was scared to death when I walked in,” Jones says. “You think someone like Nora is going to be very cynical and hard and terrifying, but I’d never had such an easygoing, really fun audition. We felt like we were sitting in her living room. That’s why I wanted to do [“Imaginary Friends”].”

Since the show’s San Diego run, O’Brien and Ephron have buffed its rough edges, although the director says the changes are largely cosmetic with the exception of the final scene. “We changed the ending substantially to a really shocking, remarkably original idea,” he says, “which I have no intention of saying.” Meanwhile director and playwright are eagerly anticipating the debut in New York, where McCarthy and Hellman enjoyed a 40-year reign.

“I can’t wait,” says O’Brien -- and not just because he’s due to receive the prestigious Mr. Abbott Award for lifetime achievement from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation on Monday.

“I’ve taken a lot of work from California to New York, and there’s not a lot of difference between the two audiences: Most people on the West Coast either have contacts on the East Coast or have come from the East Coast. But this is one piece that will hit differently. New York audiences will much more closely identify with and know the careers of these women because they were New Yorkers. They’re not exotic here. It’s like writing a play about the New York Yankees.”

If the Yankees wore skirts and had an edge, that is. But don’t mistake any of these broads for leading ladies. “Jack calls us the two antagonists,” says Kurtz, “because we’re not really the protagonists and we’re not exactly the heroines.”

Jones smiles conspiratorially. “It’s a poisonous confection,” she says.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

With friends like these...

An excerpt from Nora Ephron’s play “Imaginary Friends”:

Lillian: When would you say that you and I started feuding?

Mary: From the beginning. And then, of course, the lawsuit.

Lillian: We never liked each other.

Mary: Yes, I was always hearing that you didn’t like me.

Lillian: Well, I was always hearing you’d written mean things about me.

Mary: I didn’t write much about you.

Lillian: When you did, it was always mean. But we rarely saw one another. That night I turned on the television set, I had no idea what you were going to look like after all those years. I was watching, you know. I saw you say it. I was lying in bed, completely happy at seeing how badly you’d aged, and then you said it.

(We see a television show projected: Mary McCarthy interviewed by Dick Cavett.)

Cavett: Are there any writers you think are overrated?

Mary: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past....

Cavett: What is dishonest about her?

Mary: Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”