Writer Delia Ephron, famous for rom-coms like "You've Got Mail," knows how to dream up a fairy-tale storyline.But Ephron's Broadway debut later this month comes directly from the pages of her life.Ephron has written about intimate things before, but now it is her own life that is on the stage for everyone to see. She said it was not easy, "because I am basically introverted."But she sure makes it look easy.
When "Sunday Morning" first interviewed Ephron two-and-a-half years ago, she'd just finished a best-selling memoir, "Left on Tenth." Now she's turned that book into a play, telling her remarkable story of beating the odds.She said, "It's the story of a woman who loses her beloved husband of 38 years, and a man from her past drops into her life and she falls madly in love.
And then shortly afterwards I got diagnosed with a terrible disease, a fatal leukemia.And I survived."That's right: seven years ago, because of her blood cancer, Delia Ephron was given four months to live.
She'd already lost her sister, Nora, and her husband, Jerry, to cancer.But she somehow found love again, and got married in the hospital while undergoing chemo (a wedding that Dr.
LaPook, a friend of Ephron's, recorded).Five-time Tony Award-winner Susan Stroman is directing the play."It's about second chances, and love, and life, and being brave enough to take those second chances, 'cause most people aren't," she said.
Stroman and Ephron share something in common they wish they didn't."I sadly lost my husband to AML, to leukemia," Stroman said.
"So, when I started to read the play, I knew everything about what was going on.I didn't have to research anything, 'cause I had lived it, too."She said it is "tricky" to direct the play's turns from humor, to tragedy, and back again.
But it's a trick Stroman mastered – as "Sunday Morning" watched, tagging along every step of the way, from the first meet-and-greet, to an early rehearsal, to the stage of the James Earl Jones Theatre....