Enter smoking. The first image in Nora Ephron's Imaginary Friends at the Ethel Barrymore is of two glowing cigarettes piercing a dimly lit stage. The one dangled by Mary McCarthy (Cherry Jones) will be quickly discarded; it is, one comes to suspect, a temporary aberration in the life of this holier-than-thou novelist. But the one in the stubby fingers of Lillian Hellman (Swoosie Kurtz) might as well be surgically attached; it will coarsen her already throaty voice, shorten her life, and generate more stage smoke than a week of Phantoms.

Two cigarettes in the dark: With admirable economy, Ephron and hotter-than-hot director Jack O'Brien (Hairspray) have established a rare common-ground m[...]