When Rosie O’Donnell’s mother died at 39, her father took her and her four siblings – “his five motherless children,” she called them – to Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“I guess he thought we could best recover from the trauma of her death by living in a war zone. The IRA was nowhere near as scary as what had just happened to our lives,” the actress and television personality recalled.
“When we returned, we found her side of the closet empty. All her clothes were gone.”
That’s how O’Donnell began her contribution to Love, Loss and What I Wore, a play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron which had a highly successful off-Broadway run of more than two years and will be at the Centaur Theatre this week.
“The play was based on this simple idea: If you ask women about their clothes, they tell you about their lives,” Delia recalled in an essay in her fine collection Sister Mother Husband Dog (Blue Rider Press, 2013).
The script is based on a powerful 1995 memoir by Ilene Beckerman. “It was the story of her life told through the clothes she wore, and the awesome thing about the book was that even though it was completely specific (about her life and her clothes), reading it opened a floodgate of memories about what-you-wore-when,” Delia wrote.
The sisters, both writers and screenwriters, had worked together on several projects, including the movies Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, which Nora also directed. Nora had read Beckerman’s book and loved it. “And she knew it was a play,” wrote Delia in the tender essay, called Collaboration. Love, Loss and What I Wore was their final collaboration before Nora’s death in 2012 of complications of leukemia.
Beckerman’s story is a thread running through the play, but the Ephron sisters augmented the work and expanded it with stories they solicited from friends, including O’Donnell, writers Merril Markoe and Alex Witchel and director Shira Piven.
The play features five or more women seated on stage, reading individual stories and ensemble pieces about clothing, accessories and the memories they trigger – everything from mothers who disapprove and men who disappear to the tyranny of dressing rooms and the enduring challenge of finding bras that fit. There are more than two dozen characters, so the women have multiple roles.
When Montreal actor and director Ellen David saw Love, Loss and What I Wore in New York, she found it “funny, sweet and moving” and knew she wanted to bring it to Montreal. David learned recently that she is the 2015 recipient of the ACTRA Montreal Award of Excellence. Previous winners have included William Shatner, Dick Irvin and Jay Baruchel.
“It’s an intimate collection of stories, about everything from relationships to weight,” she said. “What they wore is like an entrée, a way into their psyches – and everyone can relate to what the women go through because everyone goes through it: disappointment, loss, illness. It runs the gamut.”
David and actor Christina Broccolini are co-producing, with David directing. The cast include Sonia Benezra, Ranee Lee, Anna Fuerstenberg and 15-year-old Samantha Levy, along with Broccolini and David.
The actor and director Denise Filiatrault directed a French version of the play, L’amour, la mort et le prêt à porter, at Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 2013; the Centaur production is its English-language première in Montreal.
The play, as Delia explained, had a difficult gestation: It was 14 years from the time they optioned the book to when it opened off-Broadway in 2009. But when it did open, it did well, with more than 1,000 performance and a 2010 Drama Desk Award – the awards recognize excellence in theatre productions – for Unique Theatrical Experience. It drew performers including Tyne Daly, Kristin Chenoweth, Fran Drescher and Carol Kane, for four-week runs. And the play has been performed on six continents.
O’Donnell’s father would remarry a few years later. And as O’Donnell recalled in her story in Love, Loss and What I Wore, she was eating breakfast with a few of her siblings when their new stepmother, a schoolteacher named Mary May, entered the kitchen that first morning she was there, wearing a long burgundy velour bathrobe with three-quarter-length sleeves and a thick white stripe and a zipper down the front.
“No one said a word,” O’Donnell continued. “My mother had had the same exact bathrobe – in blue. Electric blue.”
There was an unspoken rule in the house that her mother’s name was never to be mentioned. But that morning, O’Donnell broke the rule: She told her stepmother about her mother’s bathrobe.
“And that robe disappeared. Gone. Sent away to the same place my mother’s clothes went, I assume. To this day, that bathrobe is the only piece of clothing I can actually see in my mind. I have no visuals of prom dresses or favourite sweater or shoes I couldn’t live without. Clothes are just something I use for cover, leaving room for one electric blue memory.”
Seats are available for the April 1 and 2 perfomances of Love, Loss and What I Wore at the Centaur Theatre, 453 St-François Xavier St. in Old Montreal. Tickets are $40 and showtime is 8:30 p.m. Call 514-288-3161 for tickets. A March 31 performance, a fundraiser organized with Gloria’s Girls for the Gloria Shapiro Endowment Fund for Ovarian Cancer Research at the Jewish General Hospital, is sold out.
