Word: ephrons
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...climaxing with a series of table slaps and shrieks. Alas, this is about the only point in the show that matches the verve and vivacity of the original. You can see how it must have looked on paper. Take a dialogue-heavy, witty film (written by the urbane Nora Ephron) and cast aging teen heartthrob Luke Perry across from in-vogue Hannigan in a stage version. Financially, the combination is almost sure to succeed - Perry still has a cult following from his stint in the '90s TV soap Beverly Hills 90210, and Hannigan has guaranteed youth market appeal after American...
...very educated people, there's still a little whiff of disapproval of fiction. If I say I'm staying home and reading a biography of William Randolph Hearst, you would think I was one kind of person. If I said I was staying home reading Heartburn by Nora Ephron, you would think I was another kind of person. I think that's where the chick-lit moniker comes from, which I find a bit offensive...
...reads any of us," laments Lillian Hellman in Imaginary Friends, Nora Ephron's new play about the literary feud between Hellman and Mary McCarthy. To be sure, these two writers are remembered at least as much for their spoken words as for the ones they put on paper. Hellman, the playwright and longtime leftist, made a famous show of defiance before the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." McCarthy, an essayist and novelist who couldn't abide Hellman's politics or penchant for mixing fact and fiction...
...Ephron has imagined the two of them (Swoosie Kurtz, brittle and snappish as Hellman; Cherry Jones, elegant and withering as McCarthy) meeting in the afterlife, railing at each other anew. "I ruined your third act!" exults McCarthy. "I was your third act!" retorts Hellman. Ephron's play, alas, has two acts full of distractions and gimmicks. There are childhood flashbacks that force grown actresses to talk like widdle girls. The literary men in their lives (Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv) are trotted on and off the stage like stuffed dummies. There are actual stuffed dummies too--a cutesy stage device that...
...Tomb of the Patriarchs, a massive stone structure built by King Herod 2,000 years ago, is the grim living metaphor for dueling Abrahamisms. Despite God's promise that this land would be his people's one day, Abraham in Genesis makes a point of paying Ephron the Hittite 400 silver shekels for a cave in Hebron to serve as a burial plot. He and Sarah were laid there, and later, Scripture adds, so were Isaac and his wife Rebecca, his grandson Jacob and his first wife Leah. Herod erected a grandiose monument at what hethought was the site...