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 testimony; absent that, it’s just a series of events, first happy, then sad. There’s no suspense in her courtship with Peter, who is depicted as a dream man (brave, smart, sexy, supportive, uxorious to a fault); and while Ephron’s medical trials were surely harrowing to undergo, their depiction here is boilerplate. The play is like the ungainly offspring of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, but with neither the astringent intelligence of the former nor the charm and white-shoe polish of the latter.
Perhaps Left on Tenth would feel more involving if its version of Ephron had the appeal of her writing voice. But Marguiles is hopelessly miscast. When all of this went down, Ephron was in her 70s, a time of life she calls “the fragile season,” which explains her initial reluctance to start things up with Peter: “It would be easier, at this point, at this age, to let life go by,” she says. But the gorgeous, energetic Margulies is 58—a Hollywood 58, which is to say she looks great for 40—and there’s not a hint of aged resignation about her. Nor, unfortunately, is there much comic spark: Her monologues are slow, sincere and indicative.
Left on Tenth | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Margulies’s Ephron is too glossy to believe, as though this production didn’t trust the appeal of its own story. “No one wants to hear about older people getting it on,” Delia says—“Yes, that’s true!” said an elderly woman behind me, loudly and conclusively—so instead of the adorable real people of Ephron’s memoir we get famously attractive actors. Aside from them, however, the show is not very pretty. Directed by Susan Stroman, Left in Tenth has the energy and the color scheme of a drugstore greeting card: This is a cheap-looking production, from Beowulf Boritt’s jankily angled set to Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s blotchy projections and the least realistic prop drinks you’ll ever see.
Things perk up a bit when secondary characters are onstage: Peter Francis James as multiple men and the engaging Kate MacCluggage as various women (in a heroic assortment of wigs), plus a pair of well-trained dogs. And the extended hospital sequence toward the end at least offers us a song: Barbara Cook’s lovely recording, played in its entirety, of Amanda McBroom’s wistful “Ship in a Bottle.” But you know a show isn’t connecting when you’re grateful for the hold music.
Left on Tenth. James Earl Jones Theatre (Broadway). By Delia Ephron. Directed by Susan Stroman. With Juliana Margulies, Peter Gallagher, Kate MacCluggage, Peter Francis James. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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Left on Tenth | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
