Wore Stories

Nora and Delia Ephron are no strangers to working together, having collaborated on such films as Bewitched, You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Now, these multi-faceted sisters have brought their talents to the stage with the off-Broadway play, Love, Loss and What I Wore, now at the Westside Theater, which features a rotating cast of 15 actresses. (The current line-up features Samantha Bee, Tyne Daly, Katie Finneran, Natasha Lyonne and Rosie O’Donnell, with such stars as Kristin Chenoweth, Jane Lynch, and Rita Wilson due up later.)

The Ephrons were inspired to adapt author Ilene Beckerman’s work for the stage after Nora read the book and sent it to Delia. Both of them were drawn to the stories and the emotional connections with the clothing that the narrator wore during her experiences. So they decided to send a questionnaire to several women — which included inquiries about women’s first bras, the rules in their households, and clothing that their mothers wouldn’t let them wear — and those women sent it to other women. The resulting theatrical work features five actresses who play numerous parts, sharing stories about mothers, marriage, divorce, and shopping — all topics with which the Ephrons are intimately acquainted.

“Write what you know is a very wise rule,” says Delia. “There’s always something Nora and I try to hook in our own lives.” Adds Nora: “It makes us feel personal, and if it doesn’t feel personal, what are you doing spending weeks or years on it? One of the things that was so magical about Ilene’s book is that it was both personal to her and personal to everyone who read it.”

Simply executed, the 80-minute show uses only a few props, chairs, and microphones. “It was always our intention that this be a cousin to The Vagina Monologues,” says Nora. “That was an inspirational show in terms of illustrating how powerful material could be, without sets or costumes.” Adds Delia: “As with The Vagina Monologues, the audience is so participatory that it is almost a character in the show.”

Still, the main draw for many audience members will be the stars performing the material on stage. “We just asked every funny person we knew to do it,” says Nora about casting the original workshop earlier this year. “It is one of those things where you can get people you might not be able to get for a year, but you could get them for a night. A lot of them came and did it — and we assumed they enjoyed themselves, because so many of them are coming back for this run.” Adds Delia: “The actors are having a good time. The atmosphere is very communal.”

Nora, who is currently represented on the big screen as the director of the hit film Julie and Julia, is also no stranger to doing work that appeals primarily to women — and the challenges inherent in that genre. “I’m perhaps overly irritable about this ‘chick lit’ thing, because I think it’s a way of sort of marginalizing something that is actually meant to be read by a majority of the population,” she says. “It’s the same thing when people talk about ‘chick flicks.’ I always feel that it’s a way of condescending to certain movies. But one of the nice things about the theater is you can do a piece that is obviously aimed at women and it’s fine with everyone. There’s a big audience of women out there.”