Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Jumping off from Ilene Beckerman's minimalist 1995 memoir of the same name, Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron have bulked up their script with multiple points of view -- a la The Vagina Monologues -- with a broader focus on body image in general. The result, especially under Karen Carpenter's fluid direction, is a series of touching and often hilarious vignettes that any actress would gladly rip into. No wonder the play has attracted three rotating A-list casts for its three-month run -- although it's hard to imagine the quintet on view now, Tyne Daly, Rosie O'Donnell, Samantha Bee, Katie Finneran, and Natasha Lyonne, ever being bested.

In the current configuration, Daly gets the ball rolling by telling tales to accompany a rack of poster-size illustrations drawn from the book. Standing in for Beckerman, she's the one through-line character: "Gingy," an Upper East Side matron who creates this legacy because she wants her children to know that "I wasn't always their mother. I was a girl, I had best friends, we did stupid things." Daly is marvelous as the rebellious girl-self, as a young woman who married perhaps foolishly and definitely too young, and ultimately as an older woman who regrets the disappearance of the clothing-store chain called "The Forgotten Woman," a resource she's convinced would come in handy now that she has become one.

O'Donnell is so superb in her segments that one can't help wishing she'd never gotten sidetracked by hosting duties and instead devoted herself to acting full-time. The tale she tells of a bra-fitting ordeal in a certain Upper West Side shop is a comic gem -- and one which she fully physicalizes.