Julianna Margulies gets lost in Ephron comedy ‘Left on Tenth’

NEW YORK – In 2016, Delia Ephron became the unwitting star of her very own romantic comedy.
After publishing a New York Times piece about grieving her late husband, the waggish writer received an email from a kindly old acquaintance who was also recently widowed. They embarked on a flirty long-distance romance, which eventually blossomed into dating and marriage the following year.
It’s a modem meet-cute not unlike 1998’s “You’ve Got Mail,” the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie that Ephron co-wrote with her filmmaker sister, Nora. She eventually chronicled their keyboard courtship in the 2022 memoir “Left on Tenth,” which the author has since adapted into a frothy new Broadway play starring Julianna Margulies (“ER”) and Peter Gallagher (“The O.C.”).
“Left on Tenth,” which opened Oct. 23 at the James Earl Jones Theatre, endeavors to be both hopeful and heartwarming, recounting how Delia (Margulies) faced down two grim prognoses with cancer, and the myriad ways that her devoted partner, Peter (Gallagher), helped pull her back from death’s door. It’s clear why Ephron, 80, would wish to share their love story with the world: Together, they overcame unfathomable misfortune, all with a sunny disposition and a dance in their step.
But despite its very best intentions, the play is frustratingly surface level, rarely delving beyond Hallmark card sentiments about taking the good with the bad. At 100 minutes, the show hastily whips through a life’s worth of milestones and minutiae, told mostly through verbose exposition delivered directly to the audience.
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Seldom does a moment land before we’re flung right onto the next thing: After feverish anticipation, Delia and Peter’s first date is over and done within two minutes; later, the devastation of a beloved pet’s passing is addressed in just 30 seconds. Delia’s hospital stays are mere snapshots, too, consisting mostly of detailed treatment plans laid out by pragmatic doctors (Kate MacCluggage and Peter Francis James, capably inhabiting a multitude of roles).
For a play that insists on living in the present, it’s curious that Ephron is so allergic to letting her characters just sit in their emotions for more than an instant. Unlike her wryly astute essays, the playwright scarcely reckons with the thorny nuances of mourning, and instead settles for a rather pat depiction of grief.
Margulies and Gallagher are a convivial match, and fare best in the show’s more dramatic scenes. But they can only do so much with such thinly written characters, and the actors seem somewhat adrift in a sea of incongruous tones. In Delia’s eyes, Peter is a saintly silver fox, whose fondness for baseball and the great outdoors is only eclipsed by his passion for philosophy and feminism. His biggest “flaw” is that he schleps around New York with a backpack – although, he’s a very generous tipper at restaurants, so Delia is willing to look past his dorky travel gear.
Sure, it’s impossible to be completely objective about one’s partner. But even Joe and Kathleen in “You’ve Got Mail” had prickly exchanges and moral stumbles that made them recognizably human. On the contrary, strangers repeatedly stop Delia and Peter to remark on how perfect they look together. It may be true to Ephron’s life, but onstage, they’ve been sanded down to mawkish caricatures.
There are some occasionally startling insights, as Delia wrestles with constantly living in her sister’s shadow, even when it comes to something as horrible as disease. (She was diagnosed with the same cancer that killed Nora in 2012.) Toward the end of the play, the once-effervescent Delia writhes in excruciating pain after a bone marrow transplant. She despondently lashes out, begging for her husband to just let her go. But director Susan Stroman (“The Producers”) undercuts their agonizing exchange with a song, blaring a Barbara Cook ballad as Peter desperately pleads for his wife to hang on.
It’s one in a series of jarring choices that Stroman makes for the production. When Delia recalls how her late husband liked tap-dancing, she starts to soft-shoe with a silhouette projection on her floor-to-ceiling bookcase. And when she finally sleeps with Peter, they’re ushered into bed by frontier folk from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (Ephron’s favorite rom-com).
It’s hard to begrudge a show with such uplifting aims, but “Left on Tenth” feels at once both deeply personal and not at all. Like Delia doing battle with Verizon customer service, nothing ever quite fully connects.