Ellen Gray: Broomall's Marta Kauffman is at it again With 'Five'

* FIVE. 9 tonight, Lifetime.

THERE WAS a time, during the years that "Friends" was on NBC, when the phrase "Broomall's Marta Kauffman" probably appeared in print in Philadelphia as often as "Upper Darby's Tina Fey" does now - as if their hometowns had become part of their names.

"That's hilarious," said Kauffman, laughing, when I told her that this summer during an interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., about a very different project that the "Friends" co-creator had worked on with one of her former stars.

"Five," a two-hour anthology of short, interconnected films directed by Jennifer Aniston, Alicia Keys, Demi Moore, Patty Jenkins and Penelope Spheeris, premieres tonight on Lifetime, and, yes, it involves breast cancer, this being the month when so many things do.

But it's not, said Kauffman, one of its executive producers, "a movie about breast cancer. It's about the effect of breast cancer on these people's lives."

Strung together loosely through Pearl, who's played in some of the films by Jeanne Tripplehorn, an oncologist who's seen as a child in the first film (where Tripplehorn's "Big Love" sister wife Ginnifer Goodwin plays her character's mother), "Five" reflects as much as anything can in two hours the diversity of people's experiences with breast cancer, even including Jeffrey Tambor as a man who's been diagnosed.

There are some funny moments ("one of the reasons I wanted humor to be in it was that for both of my parents, there were so many moments when we laughed," said Kauffman, who lost both her parents to other forms of cancer). Still, it's not the kind of project you'd necessarily associate with one of the most successful sitcom writers of all time.

But then it's always interesting to see what people choose to do for their next act when their previous one rendered making a living no longer an issue.

For Kauffman's former writing partner and "Friends" co-creator - known in these parts as "Bala Cynwyd's David Crane" - one choice has been to make "Episodes," another comedy with "Friends" co-star Matt LeBlanc, but in the relatively rarefied world of Showtime, where seasons are generally shorter and creative control is more assured.

Kauffman, meanwhile, has "discovered that I like making people cry as much as I like making them laugh. It's really fun," she said.

"I think in both [Crane's and her] cases, we love work. We love to work. And it's about what are the stories you want to tell now. You don't have to tell the stories that we had to tell at one point, but the ones you want to tell. And we want to tell different stories," said the Marple-Newton High grad, who also produced the 2008 documentary, "Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh," about a woman "who participated in the only attempt to rescue Jews behind enemy lines [during World War II]. She was a poet and a diarist."

Kauffman's also been writing pilots, at least a couple of which, she said, could be described as dramas.

"Look, it's me," she said. "All of them have some comedy in them. I mean, nothing I write is strictly drama. People are funny.

"After 'Friends,' I knew I needed to redefine myself," said the writer, who turned 55 last month. "The end of 'Friends' coincided with the beginning of menopause, and it felt like a real opportunity for me to say, 'OK, here's the last chapter. What do you want to do? What do you want to do with it?'

"Really, menopause for me was an opportunity to re-examine, and to sort of look at what's coming next and who do I want to be now? And this ["Five"] is exactly the kind of thing I want to do - this kind of project, that can touch people, that can go deep."

"Five" also gave her the opportunity to work with Aniston, whose boss she used to be, on a very different level.

"It was wonderful," Kauffman said. "She did such a beautiful job. And I think she's very talented, not only as an actor, but as a director.

"It was a little bit of, 'My baby's growing up,' " she said, "but I can't take ownership of her. She's got a great visual sense, she's smart and she did a great job. And I really enjoyed that relationship."