Left on Tenth
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Left on Tenth begins on hold. Juliana Margulies plays Delia Ephron, the author of this autobiographical dramedy, and at the start of the play she is trying at length to reach someone at Verizon. Her frustration inspires her to write a 2016 column in the New York Times—which, in turn, leads to a whirlwind late-in-life romance with a California psychiatrist named Peter (an easygoing Peter Gallagher). Hello, Jung lover! “This out of that,” Delia says of the Verizon call. “All of this that happened came out of that.” And that’s what the play feels like: There’s a lot of this and that.
Most of what happens in Left on Tenth actually comes from a different column that Ephron wrote for the Times a year later. Cautiously at first—she is mourning the recent deaths of her husband and her celebrated sister, Nora, with whom she wrote the screenplay for You’ve Got Mail—she forms a deep bond with Peter; as teenagers, it turns out, they had gone out on a few dates that he remembers fondly and she not at all. “I began to believe that I had fallen into my own romantic comedy,” she says. But their happiness is soon mortally threatened by a cancer diagnosis.
Left on Tenth | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Compressed into a column, this made for a highly dramatic journey—so much so that Ephron expanded it into a memoir in 2022. That drama does not translate, alas, to this attenuated theatrical version. Ephron’s story draws power from her first-person...