The website for “Left on Tenth,” Delia Ephron’s new Broadway play, is approximately the last place I would have expected to encounter a content advisory, but there one is. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a sensible move — a tip-off, for anyone expecting pure romantic comedy, that the show also deals with life-threatening illness.
What’s strange is that, having warned us, the play doesn’t nearly go for broke. Unlike Ephron’s 2022 memoir, “Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life,” which deals affectingly with her widowhood and leukemia as well as her tripping headlong into new love, the stage adaptation gives the impression of being desperate not to bum anyone out.
So an anodyne rom-com is for the most part what we get from this play, which opened on Wednesday night at the James Earl Jones Theater. Julianna Margulies stars as Delia, an anxious, bookish denizen of Greenwich Village, still grieving her husband’s death. Peter Gallagher plays the widowed Peter, the calm Californian psychoanalyst for whom Delia falls by email, so suddenly that it feels fated.
Shades of “You’ve Got Mail,” the 1998 classic rom-com that Ephron wrote with her older sister, Nora, but what can you do? That’s how their romance sparked in real life.
It all started with an essay that Ephron wrote for The New York Times in 2016, the year after her husband Jerry’s death, about the particular circle of phone-tree hell she entered when she asked Verizon to disconnect his landline. In response, she heard from a lot of readers, one of whom was Peter, noting in an email that Nora once set them up when they were college students.
To say that Delia and Peter end up marrying is no spoiler, and probably you’ve figured out that she survives leukemia, the same disease that killed Nora in 2012. This is the kind of show that you know will end happily. The question is how it gets there.
Susan Stroman’s production opens on a rom-com staple: the enviable Manhattan apartment. Delia’s is book-lined, tasteful, moneyed, lived-in — a fantasy of New York, with an almost watercolor skyline. (The set is by Beowulf Boritt, projections by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew.)
The place is pure comfort. Walking home from the subway, Delia tells us, she turns “left onto Tenth Street,” which is one meaning of the title. Another, more poignant, is explained in the memoir: that Ephron was “left on Tenth” when her husband died. But the play doesn’t delve much into her grief for him or for Nora. It is too busy moving fast and, when joy is called for, breaking gracefully into dance.
Margulies and Gallagher do have terrific chemistry, and he is immensely charming, easy as can be onstage. Margulies, alone at the awkward top of the show, is stilted when she has no one to play opposite, but funny once Gallagher appears. The first time Delia and Peter speak on the phone, she makes a faux pas that instantly mortifies her, and her gesture of chagrin reads as a Meg Ryan homage. That’s not a bad thing.
The tale deviates from rom-com bliss when Delia, freshly in love, learns that she has leukemia. “How could I not be healthy,” she asks, “if I was so gloriously happy?”
Rounding out the play’s universe, Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage are protean in a bevy of quick-change roles, and Honey (Dulcé) and Charlie (Charlie) are sweet canine presences. (Costumes are by Jeff Mahshie, wigs and hair by Michael Buonincontro, animal training by William Berloni.)
Everyone but Delia and Peter seems hastily sketched, though; we can’t feel the relationships that connect the secondary characters to the principals. Lines that make perfect sense in the book are divorced from context here. Emotion goes missing.
The play shies from the very elements that give the memoir its weight — not only grief and sickness but also age. Possibly the show doesn’t want to risk grossing anyone out by making the lovers septuagenarians who are hot for each other, as they were in real life. The script describes Delia and Peter as “somewhere north of fifty,” which can be quite a distance from 70.
“No one wants to hear about two seventy-two-year-olds getting it on,” Ephron writes in the memoir, with amusing self-deprecation. “In a movie, I know, if you have two seventy-two-year-olds 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.”
The play includes a similar line, but it’s weaker with its vague reference to “two older people.”
In storytelling terms, it is simply more striking to start over romantically at 70-something than at 50-something. There’s a different order of danger, too, in fighting for your life against a disease — and undergoing a stem-cell transplant in the process — when you’re over 70.
Margulies, 58, and Gallagher, 69, are not playing over-70s. So it makes no sense that when Delia and Peter walk arm in arm down hospital corridors, strangers are enchanted by their devotion, stopping them to ask how long they’ve been married. “They think we’re going to say 30 years,” Delia says. In the memoir, she says 50, an altogether more remarkable number.
The play needs to take the audience by the hand and lead it to and through the most nightmarish depths of Delia’s illness, when she is in the hospital, begging to die. Instead it abruptly drops us there and expects us to switch from comedy mode to drama. (The lighting, by Ken Billington and Itohan Edoloyi, doesn’t cue us even subliminally.)
This miscalculation, which strands the actors, is especially surprising given a metaphor that’s so central to the play that it’s part of the production’s logo: totality, or a total eclipse of the sun.
Peter, who is the heavens-gazing type, tells Delia: “For absolute beauty, for the joy, you have to experience totality.”
Her illness plunges them into a terrifying murk, which only the barest glimmers of light can penetrate. That temporary state sets off the whole rest of their lives by contrast.
Yet this play, trying so hard to keep things bright, is fearful of totality. It is afraid of the dark.
The post Review: Delia Ephron’s ‘Left on Tenth’ Treads Lightly appeared first on New York Times.
