Is there anything less charming than someone or something insisting on their/its own charm?
This is the unfortunate reverberation of the Broadway adaptation of Delia Ephron’s autobiography, Left on Tenth (James Earl Jones Theatre, booking through Feb. 2, 2025), in which Ephron (Julianna Margulies) relates her experiences of grieving her first husband Jerry, finding love with second husband Peter Rutter (Peter Gallagher), and then the rollercoaster of facing and surviving cancer.
Ephron is an engaging writer (the play marks her debut as a Broadway playwright) and Margulies a brilliant actor—as any Good Wife and ER fan knows—but here something in the gelling of words, performance, and staging coagulates to stiff and awkward. Margulies is miscast as Ephron, whose words and personality feel more freewheeling than Margulies’ projection of brisk urgency and control.
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Margulies’ delivery is directed straight to us, meaning Left on Tenth is less a play, and more an alternately earnest and wisecracking TED talk. This means the play itself never takes flight after beginning promisingly with a (slightly overlong) riff on being messed around by a phone company which many can identify with—the endless transfers that go to nowhere, then getting through finally to a helpful person before the line is cut.
The story is paced like one of Ephron’s famous screenplays, You’ve Got Mail (co-written with sister Nora, like Hanging Up and Bewitched) and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Delia produced Sleepless in Seattle. The production is a relative of these-well-known movies; the segues and micro-dramas are smoothed, we meet simply-lovely-darling neighbors and friends played adeptly in multiple guises by Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage.
There are super-cute dogs—the much-loved and now dead Honey (played by Nessa Rose) and Honey’s successor, Charlie (Charlie). There are dates that don’t go well, chats, thoughts, theories, zingers.
Perhaps the theater should supply little blankies for us to curl up and watch it, as we would watching Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The jauntily worn privilege and ease of Ephron’s films—where problems and snits are really no match for accessible glamor and soothing loquaciousness—are present in this play.
Yet stuck on a stage that never changes, where changes of location are signified by lighting and minimal design changes, Left on Tenth feels beached and static, the theatrical equivalent of jogging in place.
Still, again like those films, you watch it unfold with a dopey smile. The manipulation feels as slick as the execution—and it’s a manipulation that is not unpleasant; everything, even the sad and moderately difficult stuff, goes down like sweet medicine.
This is particularly evident when Delia/Margulies meets Rutter/Gallagher—and for a long stretch the play is like the middle stretch of a romantic comedy, the awww-nice bit where the couple falls in love and have blissful days together mooning around New York (the title is taken from her short route from subway to her much-loved apartment) or on sweetly romantic and sexy trips.
There is no more venerable hero on the New York stage right now than Peter Gallagher as the real Peter—kind, hot, solicitous, playful, mischievous, supportive, he is the ideal partner taken to an almost absurd extreme; the Perfect Man incarnate.
Leaving the theater, one lady sighed at a friend, “What a guy!” It’s hard to disagree, but Peter’s saintly, rugged loveliness is also a dulling puzzle, with no conflict or character gristle for Gallagher to chew on. He just smiles, gently, nobly seduces, says the right things, seamlessly entwines himself with Delia’s life, and deploys perfect literary references. (The truly burning question the play throws up to all single people: Where are all the Peters?)
As in the movies, finally we get the gnarly drama: Ephron’s cancer. Here, she, Margulies and director Susan Stroman drop the whimsy for a vista of hospital beds, death suddenly near, tubes, agony, and flurries of suffering. A medical cliffhanger, again configured for the small or big screen rather than the stage, unfolds. In the theater we again feel the levers of manipulation rather than intense urgency.
It is hard to criticize the exposure of personally experienced, extremely serious, testing, and traumatizing illness. This is Ephron’s real life. But its presentation feels too-cute and lightly done on stage, particularly when it comes to a moment—with Delia very ill, and Peter ministering to her—that seems tailor-made to ask more of him as a character. How did he feel? Did he remain rosily stoic throughout as the play says, did he feel anything else as she, briefly and not in her right mind, tried to blow up their relationship?
Who knows—this explosive moment quickly evaporates. Bliss is restored. The end. The doggies come on for their bow, Gallagher and Margulies depart the stage as breezily as they have occupied it. If you want this particular medicine—and why not, the world being so rough and all, enjoy every syrupy glug.
