NEW YORK — Bad life stuff has a habit of coming all at once.
Joan Didion knew this when she wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Delia Ephron learned this before writing her new Broadway play, “Left on Tenth.” And most regular folks of a certain age, such as my centenarian mother, intuited it decades ago. When one older family member died of late, her response was, “Watch out, son, these things happen in threes.”
I batted that kind of talk away, but it was on my mind watching Ephron’s honest and deeply personal little memoir-as-play at the James Earl Jones Theatre, which stars Julianna Margulies as Delia and Peter Gallagher as Peter, the saintly psychotherapist with whom she found late-in-life love.
To some extent, “Left on Tenth,” which is directed with deference and vigor by Susan Stroman, gently designed by Beowulf Boritt and features two fun secondary actors in Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage, is an ode to the possibility of such a relationship and a chronicle of the awkwardness of its propagation. But it’s also a portrait of what it’s like to lose a loving partner, in this case a man with whom the writer used to dance around the bedroom, and then have to reinvent your life anew.
And it’s also a study of what it’s like to almost die from leukemia, too.
And lose your dog after years of companionship.
As I noted, things can, and do, go south all at once. And when they do, you often find that previously trivial annoyances, like being put on hold by a Verizon phone switchboard with the torturous capabilities of a brutal dictator, can cause panic.
Most humans, with some impressive exceptions, don’t think so much about all of this stuff before they reach at least 50 years old, which probably explains why the audience at the James Earl Jones Theatre was filled at my matinee with empathetic, gray-haired folks, perhaps with fond memories of “You’ve Got Mail,” and the other rom-coms that Delia Ephron penned alongside her well-known sister, Nora.
Nora Ephron herself died from complications of leukemia in 2012, something naturally relevant to her sister’s own magical thinking as she tries to explore to what extent two siblings’ fate is genetically linked and to what degree she can carve out a different future for herself.
“Left on Tenth” is based on Delia Ephron’s 2022 memoir of that name and its adaptation into a dramatic play is, you might charitably say, modest. Margulies’ Delia narrates her circumstances throughout. Gallagher’s Peter doesn’t get to express much of a point of view; he’s presented as perceived by Ephron. Scenes of the couple going out on a date or Peter ministering to Delia as she lies in a hospital bed are brief and episodic. And while both of these actors are honest, vulnerable and appealing — no faint praise — they are not delivering bravura stage performances. I’d argue such zig-zaggingly internal material does not really allow for such performances anyway. Margulies in particular was still finding her throughline at the show I saw. But it’s still a piece of acting that reflects some courage.
In some ways, “Left on Tenth” feels like a staged screenplay, which would not be surprising given Ephron’s background. At other times, you might well think that you could be lying in bed and reading the justly well-regarded source memoir and getting much the same benefits from the experience without paying for a theater ticket. It leans that heavily on narrative.
Delia Ephron does not have Didion’s ruthless, clinical ability to eschew all sentimentality and look outside her own feelings as she is feeling them. That’s not such a bad thing, arguably, in that Ephron surely wouldn’t have been able to write such fun movies and essays had she been possessed of such a dubious gift. Didion, we may confidently assert, would not have given a damn about Verizon.
Ephron does not dig deep into what new romance, and new sex, really means for the Medicare adjacent; frankly, the show suggests she ends up too much in love to care. Good for her, but such idealized characters don’t work as well on a stage. Gallagher’s charms notwithstanding.
Then again, most of us are far more like Ephron than Didion and, even though Delia’s happy ending is to some degree a consequence of her celebrity, prefer stories that offer hope and the possibility of survival and a romance that can be just as hot as the ones those kids at the other table are having.
If that’s true of you, you likely will appreciate how this show talks about getting older and realizing that to live has become very much about dealing with ever-compounding losses. It’s always nice to find you have some fellow travelers.
At the James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York; leftontenthbroadway.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
