Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron’s new Broadway play based on her best-selling memoir, relates such life-changing events as the death of her first husband, her improbable late-in-life romance, and her battle with a rare form of cancer that almost killed her.
The title has a double meaning – Ephron can turn left on Tenth Street upon exiting the subway to her dream home in the Village; it’s also how and where her late husband abandoned her (she was “left on Tenth”). But there are two layers to this show. Ostensibly it’s about Ephron’s roller-coaster relationship and health woes. But it’s also about how much easier it is to navigate these ups and downs when you’re part of the one percent.
Delia, charmingly if at times too girlishly played by Julianna Margulies, narrates much of the proceedings, telling her story with endearing pathos and humor. It’s hard not to sympathize with her throughout her travails, which amusingly begin with being stuck in “Verizon hell” as she helplessly attempts to get the phone company to restore her internet service after they mistakenly cut it off while disconnecting the landline of her recently deceased husband of 33 years. As she painfully listens to Verizon’s hold music and repeatedly gets cut off, we wince in pain. After all, who can’t relate?
Of course, most of us don’t have the opportunity to turn the situation into an amusing essay in The New York Times, which Ephron — whose credits include co-writing such movies as You’ve Got Mail and This is My Life with her late sister Nora — famously did. Said essay leads to the reappearance of Peter (Peter Gallagher), a man she briefly dated as a teenager and whom she doesn’t remember at all. But he remembers her, calling her from his home in the Bay Area to compliment her on the Times piece and catch up in general.
The two begin an at-first epistolary relationship, trading increasingly affectionate e-mails which the actors recite from separate desks as if rehearsing for a production of Love Letters. Then they begin speaking by phone, which doesn’t exactly raise the theatrical stakes. Finally, he comes to see her in New York, their sexual chemistry so off-the-charts that the theater should provide matinee audiences something to fan themselves with (this is the sort of show that should eschew evening performances entirely, since much of its target audience doesn’t like to drive at night).
If Peter wasn’t real, Ephron, no stranger to romantic comedies, would have had to invent him. As wonderfully played by Gallagher (who’s aging so well that expensive bottles of wine feel jealous), he’s practically a perfect man. Fit enough to hike in and out of the Grand Canyon not once but twice, he’s a Jungian psychotherapist who uses words like “interdimensionality” and is an expert on sexual harassment who’s defended abused women in court. He dresses beautifully and has a great sense of humor. His only apparent flaw is that he wears a backpack, which as someone points out, is true of every man in Northern California.
He’s also endlessly supportive of Delia when she falls ill, spending every minute with her in the hospital while she undergoes a risky and debilitating experimental treatment. Random strangers repeatedly stop them as they’re walking together to tell them what a lovely couple they make. (Even if such encounters did occur in real life, Ephron would have done well to leave them out.)
It all feels, sad to say, like a Lifetime movie, down to the lovable gay neighbor who reveals he’s been HIV-positive for many years and the female oncologist who treats Delia with the sort of loving compassion not much in evidence at actual NYC hospitals. Those and many other supporting figures are played by Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage with impressive versatility, making you wish their characters had more depth.
Director Susan Stroman works tirelessly to infuse the static proceedings, which too often feel like an audiobook, with theatricality. But she tries too hard, embellishing scene transitions with musical and dancing interludes that feel jarringly out-of-place. Left on Tenth tries so hard to be appealing it features not one but two live dogs onstage. It’s a wonder they’re not sent out into the audience to lick our faces.
It also demands some heavy lifting from Margulies, and a direct-address chattiness that doesn’t seem to come naturally. She’s best known for TV dramas such as ER and The Good Wife; her finest stage work to date was Ten Unknowns, Jon Robin Baitz’s compelling 2001 meditation on art versus commerce. She looks slightly self-conscious tap-dancing and waxing poetic about Zabar’s tuna salad alone onstage. With Gallagher, she’s more relaxed; he couldn’t be better cast as the earnest, self-possessed Peter, Delia’s (soon-to-be) second husband.
What neither of the leads nor Stroman – a musical maven who did a bang-up job with the 2022 non-musical POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive – and can navigate is Left On Tenth’s massive tonal shift from love story to hospital drama when Delia is diagnosed with leukemia, the cancer that eventually took Nora’s life in 2012. And everyone seems entirely unaware of the unchecked privilege that runs rampant in this tale of wealth and longevity. Not everyone having an issue with Verizon service can solve it by writing a guest essay for The New York Times, and few people get the kind of immediate and individualized healthcare Ephron receives in the play. They can’t all fly cross-country multiple times a month for a long-distance relationship.
In fact, there is no true drama or obstacle except for Delia herself; first, when she becomes skittish at the prospect of a new relationship, then as her worst fear – cancer – is confirmed. Gallagher is an accessory, and in the play’s third act, as mortality threatens, our protagonist is relegated upstage or hidden. There’s no character; this play includes theatrics, but no theatre. A play needs to be cloaked in a specific kind of cloth. This one too frequently wears no clothes at all.
Left on Tenth
James Earl Jones Theatre
www.leftontenthbroadway.com
