Act 1

The play opens on a bare stage where two women, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, are smoking. They try to recall if they had ever met, but soon admit that they were both at Sarah Lawrence College in 1948, when the two were invited to a writers' conference there. McCarthy remembers being incensed at what she considered Hellman's lies about the Spanish civil war. She interrupted and corrected Hellman, and the two began to argue.

Hellman shifts the focus to her speech to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. She recalls how she refused to identify communists by insisting, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions," her most famous quote. The two women then bicker over details of Hellman's past and discuss other female writers. They conclude that no one reads either of them anymore.

Their conversation turns back to their personal...