When Lillian Hellman reached the pinnacle of her second career, switching from the stage to personal memoirs, the esteemed novelist/essayist/critic Mary McCarthy had the temerity to attack the grand dame. "Every word she writes is a lie," she smiled, guesting on The Dick Cavett Show, "including 'and' and "the.'" Hellman, catching the nationwide telecast, responded swiftly, slapping McCarthy with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit calculated to financially crush her detractor. Sadly for all who revel in juicy gossip and catty spectacle, Hellman died before she could star in "Versus McCarthy" on the courtroom stage. Nora Ephron, the screenwriter who gave us "Sleepless in Seattle," seeks to rectify that anticlimax by granting an onstage afterlife to both litigants. Now they can snipe at each other with charismatic gusto, recount their thumbnail biographies, and... sing a few songs.
Two stage heavyweights make the fight worth watching. Swoosie Kurtz captures Hellman's scrappy malice and steely fury. In a subtler, more nonchalant triumph, Cherry Jones revives McCarthy's serene arrogance. Music by Marvin Hamlisch, with lyrics by Craig Carnelia, reassures us that Ephron's exploration will never get serious. Instead we get a lengthy laundry list of parallels between the lives of these two literary lionesses, paired with an equally long list of contrasts. Yes, this hybrid musical bitch-a-thon grows tedious at times.
The question Ephron keeps posing to us, whether Hellman and McCarthy could ever have been friends, is not the sort a world-class playwright would obsess over. It's more like the preoccupation of a world-class yenta.
