When the play “Left on Tenth” opens, a woman named Delia, played by Julianna Margulies, tells us about her major problem in life. After the sudden death of her second husband, she tried to disconnect his landline. Verizon, by mistake, also discontinued her internet service and she can’t get a real person on the phone to discuss this crisis. When someone at Verizon finally does speak to her, Delia is transferred to another department and put on hold before being disconnected.
I use Spectrum, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t sympathize.
Delia Ephron’s “Left on Tenth,” based on her 2022 memoir of the same title, opened Wednesday at the James Earl Jones Theatre. It’s a 100-minute one-act play, directed by Susan Stroman, that puts you in a bad mood even before it begins. Pre-curtain, we’re treated to various automated Verizon messages that tell us to hold, we’ll be right with you and so on. It’s frustrating enough when this happens in the privacy of one’s own home. It’s infuriating in the theater, and Ephron and Stroman are to blame, not Verizon, for making an audience sit through such audio pollution.
You might also want to tell Delia to get a grip, since she’s living on 10th Street in the Village in a very big apartment with a gorgeous view. Beowulf Boritt’s set design turns that apartment into something like the Oval Office, not a place most people would like to live, but hey, she’s got space!
Which brings me to “You’ve Got Mail.” It’s the movie Delia wrote with her oldest sister, Nora Ephron. The first 15 minutes of “Left on Tenth” feature a lot of name dropping. Since nothing of dramatic interest happens beyond the Verizon nonsense, it’s something of a relief to hear about the Ephron family. Delia lets us know that her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, wrote the successful Broadway play “Take Her, She’s Mine.” My mind instead wandered to the Ephrons’ dreadful screenplay for the movie version of “Carousel,” which is not mentioned. Better than her parents having written a Broadway hit, Delia tells us that they both were angry drunks. Memoirists, even those born into great privilege like the four Ephron daughters, love having abusive parents. Without a terrible mom and dad, there would be no memoir.
Delia also has an adorable little dog, Honey (played by Dulce), that she trots out to keep the uncomplicated plot moving. Spoiler alert: this first little dog comes to a tragic end for which Delia takes responsibility, but no problem. The nice thing about child substitutes is that they’re so easily replaced, unlike human kids, and Delia soon gets herself another fur baby, Charlie (played by Charlie), albeit bigger than the first.
In “Left on Tenth,” the human actors Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage play over a dozen featured characters between them, and it is mildly suspenseful to wonder what costumes, by Jeff Mahshie, they will show up in next. Most impressive are the many wigs, by Michael Buonincontro, that MacCluggage dons throughout the show. How does she make these dramatic changes in so little time? Amazing.
Ephron’s play is one of Stroman’s few forays outside musical theater. Nonetheless, all the actors get to dance a lot, and it’s meant to be funny and charming because none of them can dance.
Shades of a rom-com emerge in “Left on Tenth” when Delia meets online a Jungian therapist, Peter (Peter Gallagher), and begins long email and phone conversations with him before they actually meet face to face. Is there anything less dramatic on stage than people sending each other email messages?
Yes, that would be watching Delia go through her two medical treatments for leukemia. Stroman must know how painful yet undramatic this is because she sends James and MacCluggage on stage to distract us with a Ballet of the Hospital Partitions. These framed blue curtains keep crisscrossing the stage while Margulies makes minor changes in her facial expressions and moves from her back to the left side of her body then to the right. “Left on Tenth” captures perfectly the tedium of being in a hospital, for both the patient and the visitor.
Before Delia gets sick, Margulies is perky to the point of robotic. Illness becomes her.
Since I prefer memoirs from people who have achieved something in life rather than survived something, I didn’t know about Ephron’s health problems. I was only mildly engaged watching “Left on Tenth” when Gallagher’s Peter finally shows up to woo Margulies’ Delia. Peter is so smitten even before he meets Delia that I thought he had to be a stalker, and Ephron’s memoir was about her falling in love and then fending off a real nut job. How disappointing to learn that I was supposed to be swallowing this schmaltz about her present husband without a dollop of irony to wash the goop down.
Peter turns out not to be a pervert. He is too good to be true, and you won’t believe this character for a second. I had other good reasons to be suspicious.
Elsewhere in the play, Delia has an HIV-positive friend who takes at least 20 different drugs a day just to stay alive. Clearly, his doctor forgot to tell him several years ago about Descovy. Delia also has “Der Rosenkavalier” being performed in Central Park at the Naumburg Bandshell. “La Boheme,” maybe. “Der Rosenkavalier,” never.
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