“Left on Tenth,” which Delia Ephron has adapted for the stage from her best-selling memoir about death, second love, and survival, stars beloved TV star Julianna Margulies; it’s put together by Tony winning talents like director Susan Stroman and scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, it even features not just one but two adorable dogs. These are all reasons why theatergoers might be drawn to it – especially fans of Margulies, who is returning to Broadway after 18 years, and of Ephron, who is making her Broadway playwriting debut at age 80.
But “Left on Tenth” didn’t work for me. The problems I have with the production are not, I don’t think, primarily a matter of taste. Ephron’s memoir just didn’t translate well to the stage.
The play begins with an elegant, empty, book-lined apartment beneath a projection of a skyline that includes a water tower, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building (Delia lives on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village.) The sound of piped-in hold music from Verizon is followed by a voiceover of a customer service representative coming on the line. Julianna Margulies as Delia Ephron rushes across the length of the stage to grab the phone. She’s transferred from one rep to another to another, ending in a dial tone.
This everyday frustration for New Yorkers, comic except when you’re experiencing it, turns out to be a crucial moment in Delia’s life – as she immediately starts explaining in a direct address to the audience.
She had disconnected her husband’s landline, she tells us, because he died six months ago after thirty-three years of marriage. But somehow in the process Verizon crashed her Internet connection. Her effort to get them to turn it back on so exasperated her that she wrote an essay about it that was published in the New York Times.
Peter Rutter reads it.
“Your Times piece about disconnecting your late husband’s phone closely matched my attempts to do so with my late wife’s phone,” Peter (portrayed by Peter Gallagher), writes in an email from his home in Northern California (we see projections of big trees.)
Delia and Peter, a psychiatrist who’s written several books, prove intensely compatible. They have much in common; they even went on a few dates with one another decades earlier, having been fixed up by Delia’s older sister, Nora Ephron, although Delia doesn’t remember him at all.
Delia is initially nervous, suspicious of this sudden potential relationship, but this writer of romantic comedies tells us “I began to believe that I had fallen into my own romantic comedy,” and their courtship scenes in which they get to know one another — first by email, then phone, then (after he flies to New York to see her) over dinner; in Washington Square Park ( we see a projection of the arch); on vacation together; in bed – are brief and frictionless.
So “Left on Tenth” is about a second chance at love. But it’s also about a second chance at life. Shortly after they fall in love, Delia is diagnosed with leukemia. The rest of the play focuses on the ups and downs, ins and outs of her treatment, with Peter always by her side.
Ephron’s book, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance At Life: A Memoir, published in 2022, begins with a paragraph that explains the title: “If you are in Manhattan traveling downtown in a car on Fifth Avenue or Seventh Avenue and you want to turn onto Tenth Street, you have to turn left. It’s a one-way street, west to east. Left on Tenth is my way home. I was left on Tenth when my husband died, and after that, my life took many left turns, some perilous, some wondrous. This book is about all of them.”
I think it’s telling that the reference to driving a car down Fifth Avenue and turning left, is changed on stage to getting off the subway and turning left – as if scrubbing off some of her privilege will make the character more relatable. But, for the most part, a nuanced self-portrait emerges in the expansive pages of the book, which weaves in much observation and reflection as Ephron tells her story.
By contrast, the creative team seems to have decided there is little time for nuance in the stage version, which feels busy, superficial, forced. Both Delia and Peter spend much of their time in direct address to the audience, as if there’s too much to get through to dramatize everything. It doesn’t help that Margulies plays too broadly, apparently overcompensating for her relative inexperience on stage. (She seems to get more natural as the plot progresses.) But the problem seems rooted in the script. Two other actors in the cast, Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage, are terrific quick-change artists, each portraying some dozen characters – friends, neighbors, medical personnel, various service people. But why do we need so many difficult-to-distinguish peripheral characters? This is more common in a movie than the theater.
Movies seem the primary point of reference for Delia Ephron, who has written in many genres, including as a novelist, essayist, humorist — she even co-wrote a popular play “Love, Loss and What I Wore”—but who is apparently most comfortable and surely best known as a screenwriter and movie producer, especially in collaboration with Nora Ephron.
“Left on Tenth” features some efforts at visual storytelling, a couple of them to illustrate her grief at the death of her husband: In one moment, we see her dancing with a projection of him. At another, the apartment turns into the waterfall at the World Trade Center Memorial, which, Delia tells us, she visited on the anniversary of his death. The second projection is more effective technically than the first, but both are inadequate shorthand for the details she writes about in her memoir.
At one point, Delia, after telling us how great the sex with Peter has been, addresses the audience apologetically: “No one wants to hear about older people getting it on. I know, from making movies, if you show two older people simply kissing, you want the camera far away, like across the street or out the window. But our attraction was an essential part of the magic.”
On the one hand, you want to root for a play that’s about love between older adults. On the other hand, you would want such a play – or any play – to feel less calculating. Older people can be as glamorous as Margulies and Gallagher, but it shouldn’t feel as if they have to be. And if the effort at heartstring-tugging in the play is not always completely shameless, there is one moment in “Left on Tenth” that goes too far. Honey the dog suddenly trots off the stage and doesn’t come back, even after Delia calls for her. Delia then tells us (spoiler alert) that she died: “I sobbed uncontrollably for Honey. If you’ve ever lost a dog, you know.”
Left on Tenth
James Earl Jones Theater
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission.
Tickets: $74 – $291. Digital lottery: $49
Written by Delia Ephron based on her memoir
Directed by Susan Stroman
Scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design by Jeff Mahshie, lighting design by Ken Billington and Itohan Edoloyi, sound design by Jill BC Du Boff, projection design by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, wig design by Michael Buonincontro, and animal training by William Berloni Theatrical Animals.
Cast: Julianna Margulies, Peter Gallagher, Peter Francis James, Kate MacCluggage, two dogs.
Photographs by Joan Marcus
