Theater Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Fifty-four years ago movie audiences wept uncontrollably at Love Story, based on a novel by Erich Segal, in which glowingly golden college students Oliver and Jenny, played by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw fall in love, overcome obstacles, marry, and suffer exquisitely when Jenny slowly succumbs to cancer. With its hit song and classically schmaltzy line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” the film became an instant smash. I don’t foresee a similar fate for popular novelist and screenwriter Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth, her more upbeat, decidedly less moving, geriatric take on a similar dramatic trope. Hers, though, isn’t fictional, but closely based on her 2022 memoir (subtitled A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir).
I was unaware, however, while watching it that it began as a memoir, so I texted my plus-one afterward that Left on Tenth should have been one rather than a play. As staged with beautiful actors in beautiful settings, even its most serious scenes partake of a rom-com glow that inoculates you against feeling the curse of reality even in a true story. Delia Ephron (You’ve Got Mail), scion of a fabled writing family—her very close sister, Nora, is frequently referenced—was in her early 70s during the time shown. In the play she’s portrayed by the svelte, 59-year-old Juliana Margulies, who even does a few tap steps.
In the 100-minute, intermissionless play, whose two-part structure is almost like two different plays, Delia recalls, in direct address mingled with acted-out scenes, what happened after her beloved first husband died. Right away she’s seen struggling to have Verizon restore her internet after they mistakenly turned it off while canceling her husband’s landline. Her hassles with contacting the company—forcing her to play the kind of phone hopscotch we’ve all experienced when trying to reach someone with a technical question—give Margulies an opportunity to perform an extended SNL-like skit, setting us up for what promises to be a comedic experience. What happens, though, is of another mind.
Reading the op-ed Ephron wrote in the New York Times about the Verizon debacle is Peter Rutter (Peter Gallagher), a handsome widower of a certain age who happens to be a successful Jungian psychoanalyst in San Francisco. Peter, considering the moment “bashert” (Yiddish for “fated”), emails Delia, leading to multiple similar messages as romantic seeds are planted. Then come the phone calls before Peter finally flies to New York, where he and Delia enjoy a picture-perfect affair before she discovers she’s got a form of leukemia. This leads to doctor visits, diagnoses, tests, experimental treatments, remission, relapses, and the like, with Peter, a devoted supporting angel who truly earns his wings, always at her bedside as the disease follows its relentless course.
Numerous memoirs—celebrity and others—like those of Martin Short and Richard E. Grant, have recounted in painstaking detail much the same experiences, usually with a tragic resolution. In Left on Tenth, the hospital bed scenes pay off in a conventional romantic ending overseen by a total eclipse of the sun, making the play seem more suitable to the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” than Broadway. I suggest it’s time to retire for a while the disease of the week trope, with all its clinical reportage about medical protocols (here it’s bone marrow transfusions) and bedridden patients being supported by devoted relatives or friends.
Be that as it may, when we’re not watching Delia’s valiant struggle to overcome her illness, Left on Tenth serves up tasty enough middlebrow comfort food for seniors. Her privileged circumstances, cheerful insouciance, and warm intelligence, make her such a perfect match for the brilliant, big-tipping, Wordsworth-spouting, rhetorically gifted (wait for his pontifications on “totality”) Peter that—after being influenced by so many books, films, and plays—it may take some time before you appreciate that he means business and really does desire her.
Delia enjoys a magazine-layout lifestyle in a Greenwich Village house whose semicircular, classical-style library, designed by Beowulf Boritt, is built so each half can slide away into different configurations, even turning completely around to allow for the hospital scenes. The episodic action, lit smartly by Ken Billington and Itohan Edoloyi, moves swiftly under Susan Stroman’s light-handed direction. Small units slide on and off to represent the many locales, many realized in Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew’s lovely projections of colorful exterior scenes. Jill BC Du Boff’s sound score is another fine contribution.
Multiple characters, like doctors, nurses, best friends, waiters, orderlies, and even a couple from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers are delightfully impersonated by Peter Frances James and Kate MacCluggage, wearing a succession of character-identifying costumes by Jeff Marshie and wigs by Michael Buonincontro. A few scenes are stolen from the humans by two adorable dogs in the roles of Honey (Nessa Rose) and Charlie (Charlie), trained by Broadway’s master animal wrangler, William Berloni.
Gallagher and Margulies are an alluring couple. He plays Peter with a nice blend of straight-faced earnestness and low-key sincerity, while Margulies, seeking to win the audience early with comic charm, comes on too strong in the early scenes. Eventually, she settles down to less overtly insistent acting and finds her sweet spot. Their coupling, however, goes a long way to making Left on Tenth the romantic diversion it intends to be.
Left on Tenth. Open run at the James Earl Jones Theatre (138 West 48th, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues). www.leftontenthbroadway.com
Photos: Joan Marcus