By Monty Arnold
16 Oct 2009

Nora and Delia Ephron
photo by Aubrey Reuben

The chick-flick writing team of Nora and Delia Ephron explores women's wear in Off-Broadway's Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

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It's a chick thing, Nora Ephron is basically saying about this play she and her sister Delia have written — and Nora would know. The phrase "chick flick" entered our lexicon via her Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated script for "Sleepless in Seattle," where she cinematically separated the boys from the girls and called leaping into a lugubrious tub of suds like "An Affair to Remember" a ladies-only enterprise.

Now, fashion (or, more accurately, women's wear) is the Ephron flash point, and The Great Divide begins all over again with Love, Loss, and What I Wore, based on Ilene Beckerman's wafer-thin 1995 memoir on how she dressed for the seminal moments of her life — sort of a The Way We Wore version of "The Way We Were." The Ephrons describe it as "The Vagina Monologues without the vagina," and, keeping that thought, they installed it at the same Westside Theatre where the V-word held fast for more than three years. For this opening salvo of 12 weeks, they have three sets of rotating casts of five each. The hope, of course, is that their show will evolve into a cottage industry like Eve Ensler's evening of girl talk.

"We started out very much thinking it would be that kind of evening," Nora remembers, "monologues and group ensemble pieces and sketches — just a very free-form thing that, nonetheless, goes through all the stages of a woman's life."

She found the book in galley form and flipped over it, even though Beckerman was speaking from a slightly older perspective. "It's her life story told through her clothes, but it's a magical little book, weirdly interactive, because you read it and you start thinking of your own clothes, whether they were anything like hers or not.

"We used her story as part of the play, but what we were going for was the same reactions in the audience. Even those of us who aren't into fashion can date our life by our clothes and the mistakes we made expressing ourselves through our clothes.

"You know, before you can go on the street by yourself or decide what you feel like eating, you are allowed to dress yourself. It's one of the earliest ways you have of saying, 'This is who I am today.' So, for women, clothes just become this constant thing of 'Who am I?'/'Is this me?'/'Who do I want people to think I am?'/'Can I get away with this?'/'Who was I when I bought this?'/'What on earth was I thinking?'

"It's a very emotional piece. It's not about fashion. It's about women's lives, and the way to talk about them is through their clothes. To me, it's an amazing window into looking at women's lives. There's a reason it's Love, Loss, and What I Wore."

Beckerman's eschewed life-view was so insistently identifiable the Ephrons jumped right in and gave it a universal spin. "We sent out e-mails and questionnaires and interviewed people about their life and their clothes," recalls Delia. "All of our friends sent us stories. I mean, the thing about your clothes is that it's not just your clothes — it's the memories of what happened to you when you were wearing them. If you're a guy, you probably don't realize that, but women remember everything in terms of what they were wearing the night it happened. Once we got all this wonderful material, we then started to prune and shape monologues with it.

"It covers a huge range of things — everything from your first bra to a girl who throws her 20s away on a terrible guy to people who wear black to what a woman wears to visit the man she loves in prison to a piece on how we hate our purses." Seeing the last requires explaining, she offers: "What we hate is what's inside the purse. We hate the mess about our lives that is reflected by what's in our purse."

Writing together is the family trade. Nora and Delia are the daughters of a celebrated screenwriting team, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, that eased many a stage hit on to the screen ("Carousel," "John Loves Mary," "Desk Set") and occasionally gave back to Broadway (their Take Her, She's Mine was prompted by Nora's letters home from college). The sisters grew up Princesses of the Apthorp, inveterate West Siders whose affection for the neighborhood was vibrantly visual in "You've Got Mail," "This Is My Life" and "When Harry Met Sally".

"We do every form of collaborating that you can do," beams Nora. "We write together. We write separately together. On something like this, one of us might write most of a piece or take the first pass at it, and the other's the editor or suggester."

The Ephrons got their play up and at 'em in a series of Monday night workshops last winter at their producer Daryl Roth's DR2 Theatre. "One of the things we found is that people wouldn't leave," Delia says. "They gathered in the lobby afterwards and wanted to talk about their lives and their clothes and what happened to them. They were just flooded with memories. It's a powerful piece because it stirs that up."

Ladies, start your engines!

Tyne Daly, Rosie O’Donnell, Samantha Bee, Katie Finneran and Natasha Lyonne in Love, Loss, and What I Wore
photo by Carol Rosegg

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