You may not know the name Stan Zimmerman, but if you’ve ever watched an episode of “The Golden Girls,” “Gilmore Girls” or “Roseanne,” you may already know his work.
But, whether you know his name or not, you owe it to yourself to check out Zimmerman’s original play, “right before I go,” in which he also acts as the narrator.
Zimmerman’s 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, “a nonprofit professional theatre troupe whose mission is to stage true stories to open minds and hearts and inspire action worldwide.” Powerstories will “Celebrate the Power of the Arts” 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 “right before i go” itself is “only about an hour long” 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.
“I feel that with this piece, the audience will need to talk about it afterwards,” Zimmerman says. “It’s really about starting a discussion. I’ve found that after the show, people want to talk about it with total strangers on the street or friends and family.”
Theatrical Rights Worldwide (TRW) had this to say about the play: “Stan Zimmerman brings to life the last words written in letters by individuals lost to suicide — including celebrities, veterans, kids that were bullied, LGBTQ and the clinically depressed — and those who have survived suicide attempts. Since its acclaimed first performance at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2015, the play has traveled across the country, raising awareness and offering hope for suicide prevention.”
Zimmerman, who says he was mercilessly bullied and regularly spit on in 7th, 8th and 9th grade, admits that he would go home and “visualize taking my own life” many times.
In an interview on YouTube, he said, “I don’t suffer from depression, but if I did, and had those feelings [of suicide], I honestly don’t know if I’d be here today.”
But then, in 2012, “I 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 ‘suicide notes’ 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.”
With his career predominantly as a comedy writer, Zimmerman says he really scoured the internet in order to try to find a “funny” suicide note, “but what I found is that there really wasn’t 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 anyone’s life when they decide to do this.”
He says that when the play was first performed at the Fringe Festival, “the tendency for the actors was to play the result, you know, where this was going. And I had to remind them that there’s an urgency to these notes. These people that wrote these notes needed to get this out [because] they weren’t being heard and they had to tell people what they felt inside. And I think that’s why they’re all so powerful.” The subtitle of “right before i go” is “Destigmatizing Suicide.”
As for how he approached writing “right before i go,” Zimmerman says, “I wanted this to be sort of like ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ in that it would be something that would be easily performed and wouldn’t take a lot of rehearsal, so theatre companies, when they did this piece, they could rehearse it for a couple of hours or a couple of days and interpret it any way they wanted.”
He also says that it just came to him “how the structure needed to be and how to group the notes to tell the story.”
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 didn’t originally intend to be the play’s narrator, “When I did the first table read in my living room with friends of mine, a lot of them said, ‘You’re a writer, you need to put yourself in this piece.’ That’s when I started writing a lot more in between. And, they said they wanted hope, so that’s when I started putting a lot of stuff about hope at the end.”
An Illustrious Career
Although Zimmerman and his long-time writing partner James Berg were never the head writers on “The Golden Girls,” “Gilmore Girls” or “Roseanne,” 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 didn’t receive writing credits for the original script of “The Brady Bunch Movie” (and weren’t happy about it), the team was hired by the film’s 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 “A Very Brady Sequel,” which also became a hit in 1996.
And, while none of the other TV series the pair wrote for — including the TV adaptation of the hit movie “Fame,” as well as “Just Our Luck,” “Pauly” and “Rita Rocks,” to name just a few — became monster hits, they also were hired as “term writers” for other series, most notably “The Nanny.”
Their work won the team two Writers Guild of America award nominations — for the “Rose’s Mother” episode of “The Golden Girls” and the infamous “Lesbian Kiss” episode of “Roseanne.”
Zimmerman and Berg also were the writers for “Ladies of the ‘80s: A Divas Christmas,” a 2023 TV Christmas comedy starring some of the most famous TV divas of the ‘80s — Loni Anderson (“WKRP in Cincinnati”), Morgan Fairchild (“Flamingo Road” and “Falcon’s Crest”), Linda Gray (“Dallas”), Donna Mills (“Knots Landing”) and Nicollette Sheridan (also “Knots Landing” and later, “Desperate Housewives”).
Also last year, Indian River Publishing (an independent book publishing company distributed by Simon & Schuster) published Zimmerman’s book The Girls: from Golden to Gilmore, subtitled “Stories about all the wonderful women I’ve worked with…” (Note-He says that the words that come after the ellipsis are “and Roseanne,” although the book cover doesn’t say it.)
The book tells Zimmerman’s true story as a TV and film writer and yes, all of the wonderful women he and Berg worked with together. I’ve read several chapters of my copy, which I will ask Stan to autograph when I meet him next month. It’s a great read.
Editor’s note — Although I also interviewed him on the phone, most of the direct quotes in this article came from the YouTube video “Playwright Stan Zimmerman Discusses Right Before I Go.” And, the information about his early life and career came from The Girls.
For tickets ($40-$100) to the performances of “right before i go,” visit bit.ly/NNCelebration or Powerstories.com.
