
You may not know the name Stan Zimmerman, but if youโve ever watched an episode of โThe Golden Girls,โ โGilmore Girlsโ or โRoseanne,โ you may already know his work.
But, whether you know his name or not, you owe it to yourself to check out Zimmermanโs original play, โright before I go,โ in which he also acts as the narrator.
Zimmermanโs play about suicide notes will be performed at the New Tampa Performing Arts Center (NTPAC, 5850 Hunters Village Rd.) on Friday and Saturday, September 20-21, 7 p.m., by Powerstories, โa nonprofit professional theatre troupe whose mission is to stage true stories to open minds and hearts and inspire action worldwide.โ Powerstories will โCelebrate the Power of the Artsโ throughout the weekend, which also will include an art display, raffles, appetizers, staged reading, talkback, celebrity meet & greet and live music.
Zimmerman, who also has directed many plays, says โright before i goโ itself is โonly about an hour longโ and that there will be a half-hour sit-down with a mental health professional following the performance. A portion of the ticket sales will be donated to the Crisis Center of Hillsborough. Also scheduled to be readers are chief meteorologist Denis Phillips and anchor Wendy Ryan of ABC Action News Tampa Bay.
โI feel that with this piece, the audience will need to talk about it afterwards,โ Zimmerman says. โItโs really about starting a discussion. Iโve found that after the show, people want to talk about it with total strangers on the street or friends and family.โ
Theatrical Rights Worldwide (TRW) had this to say about the play: โStan Zimmerman brings to life the last words written in letters by individuals lost to suicide โ including celebrities, veterans, kids that were bullied, LGBTQ and the clinically depressed โ and those who have survived suicide attempts. Since its acclaimed first performance at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2015, the playย has traveled across the country, raising awareness and offering hope for suicide prevention.โย
Zimmerman, who says he was mercilessly bullied and regularly spit on in 7th, 8th and 9th grade, admits that he would go home and โvisualize taking my own lifeโ many times.
In an interview on YouTube, he said, โI donโt suffer from depression, but if I did, and had those feelings [of suicide], I honestly donโt know if Iโd be here today.โ
But then, in 2012, โI was one of a couple of people who received a suicide note from a very good friend of mine named Kevin, who took his own life. I started Googling โsuicide notesโ and had an idea to use my craft to put what I found into a play, with actors reading the suicide notes in order to help raise awareness and prevention for suicide.โ

With his career predominantly as a comedy writer, Zimmerman says he really scoured the internet in order to try to find a โfunnyโ suicide note, โbut what I found is that there really wasnโt one. Some of them were lighter, and that some people will laugh or giggle, but that may be nervous laughter. But, this is a very important moment in anyoneโs life when they decide to do this.โ
He says that when the play was first performed at the Fringe Festival, โthe tendency for the actors was to play the result, you know, where this was going. And I had to remind them that thereโs an urgency to these notes. These people that wrote these notes needed to get this out [because] they werenโt being heard and they had to tell people what they felt inside. And I think thatโs why theyโre all so powerful.โ The subtitle of โright before i goโ is โDestigmatizing Suicide.โ
As for how he approached writing โright before i go,โ Zimmerman says, โI wanted this to be sort of like โThe Vagina Monologues,โ in that it would be something that would be easily performed and wouldnโt take a lot of rehearsal, so theatre companies, when they did this piece, they could rehearse it for a coupleย of hours or a couple of days and interpret it any way they wanted.โย
He also says that it just came to him โhow the structure needed to be and how to group the notes to tell the story.โ
Meanwhile, Zimmerman says that although he has made a career of writing, his first love was acting, and he started his career in the theatre program at New York University.
And, even though he didnโt originally intend to be the playโs narrator, โWhen I did the first table read in my living room with friends of mine, a lot of them said, โYouโre a writer, you need to put yourself in this piece.โ Thatโs when I started writing a lot more in between. And, they said they wanted hope, so thatโs when I started putting a lot of stuff about hope at the end.โ
An Illustrious Career
Although Zimmerman and his long-time writing partner James Berg were never the head writers on โThe Golden Girls,โ โGilmore Girlsโ or โRoseanne,โ the Zimmerman/Berg team did write multiple episodes for all three and were able to capitalize on those successes (and others) with many other writing credits.
In addition, while they also didnโt receive writing credits for the original script of โThe Brady Bunch Movieโ (and werenโt happy about it), the team was hired by the filmโs director Betty Thomas to do rewrites of the original script, and the movie became a hit. Zimmerman and Berg would then get full writing credits for โA Very Brady Sequel,โ which also became a hit in 1996.
And, while none of the other TV series the pair wrote for โ including the TV adaptation of the hit movie โFame,โ as well as โJust Our Luck,โ โPaulyโ and โRita Rocks,โ to name just a few โ became monster hits, they also were hired as โterm writersโ for other series, most notably โThe Nanny.โ

Their work won the team two Writers Guild of America award nominations โ for the โRoseโs Motherโ episode of โThe Golden Girlsโ and the infamous โLesbian Kissโ episode of โRoseanne.โ
Zimmerman and Berg also were the writers for โLadies of the โ80s: A Divas Christmas,โ a 2023 TV Christmas comedy starring some of the most famous TV divas of the โ80s โ Loni Anderson (โWKRP in Cincinnatiโ), Morgan Fairchild (โFlamingo Roadโ and โFalconโs Crestโ), Linda Gray (โDallasโ), Donna Mills (โKnots Landingโ) and Nicollette Sheridan (also โKnots Landingโ and later, โDesperate Housewivesโ).
Also last year, Indian River Publishing (an independent book publishing company distributed by Simon & Schuster) published Zimmermanโs book The Girls: from Golden to Gilmore, subtitled โStories about all the wonderful women Iโve worked with…โ (Note-He says that the words that come after the ellipsis are โand Roseanne,โ although the book cover doesnโt say it.)
The book tells Zimmermanโs true story as a TV and film writer and yes, all of the wonderful women he and Berg worked with together. Iโve read several chapters of my copy, which I will ask Stan to autograph when I meet him next month. Itโs a great read.
Editorโs note โ Although I also interviewed him on the phone, most of the direct quotes in this article came from the YouTube video โPlaywright Stan Zimmerman Discusses Right Before I Go.โ And, the information about his early life and career came from The Girls.
For tickets ($40-$100) to the performances of โright before i go,โ visit bit.ly/NNCelebration or Powerstories.com.


























