At the beginning of the play “Left on Tenth”, a woman named Delia, played by Julianna Margulies, tells us about her main problem in life. After the sudden death of her second husband, she tried to disconnect his landline phone. Verizon has mistakenly discontinued internet service and cannot reach a real person on the phone to discuss this crisis. When someone at Verizon finally talks to her, Delia is transferred to another department and placed on hold before being disconnected.
I use Spectrum, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t sympathize.
Delia Ephron’s play “Left on Tenth,” based on her 2022 memoir of the same title, opened on Wednesday at the James Earl Jones Theater. It’s a 100-minute one-act play directed by Susan Stroman that will get you in a bad mood before it even begins. Before the curtain, we receive various Verizon automated messages telling us to hold, we will contact you, and so on. It’s frustrating enough when it happens in the comfort of your own home. There’s an outcry in the theater, and Ephron and Stroman are to blame, not Verizon, for the audience sitting in such sound pollution.
You can also tell Delia to pull herself together because she lives on 10th Street in the Village in a very large apartment with a great view. Boritt’s Beowulf setting turns this apartment into a sort of Oval Office, not a place most people would want to live, but hey, she’s got space!
Which brings me to You’ve Got Mail. This is a movie that Delia wrote with her oldest sister Nora Ephron. The first 15 minutes of “Left on Tenth” are full of name changes. Since there’s nothing interesting going on outside of the Verizon nonsense, I’m relieved to hear about the Ephron family. Delia informs us that her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, wrote the successful Broadway play “Take Her, She’s Mine.” Instead, my thoughts wandered to the Ephrons’ terrible script for the film version of “Carousel,” which went unmentioned. Better than her parents writing a Broadway hit, Delia tells us they were both raging drunks. Diarists, even those born into a time of great privilege like Efron’s four daughters, love having abusive parents. Without that terrible mom and dad, there would be no memories.
Delia also has an adorable dog, Honey (played by Dulce), whom she takes for walks to keep the simple plot going. Spoiler alert: this first little dog ends tragically, for which Delia takes responsibility, but that’s okay. The advantage of baby substitutes is that, unlike human babies, they can be replaced so easily, and Delia soon gets another furry pet, Charlie (played by Charlie), although larger than the first.
In Left on Tenth, human actors Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage play a dozen or so main characters, and it’s a little suspenseful to wonder what costumes by Jeff Mahshi they will appear next. Most impressive are the numerous wigs by Michael Buonincontro that MacCluggage wears throughout the performance. How does she manage to make such dramatic changes in such a short time? Incredible.
Ephron’s play is one of Stroman’s few forays beyond musical theater. Nevertheless, all the actors dance a lot, and this is supposed to be funny and cute because none of them can dance.
Shadows of a romantic comedy emerge in “Left on Tenth” when Delia meets Jungian therapist Peter (Peter Gallagher) online and begins long conversations with him via e-mail and phone before they actually meet face-to-face. Is there anything less dramatic on stage than people emailing each other?
Yes, that would be watching Delia undergo two treatments for leukemia. Stroman must know how painful but undramatic this is, because he sends James and MacCluggage on stage to distract us with the Ballet of Hospital Divisions. Those surrounded by blue curtains cut across the stage as Margulies makes slight changes in facial expression and moves from her back to the left side of her body, then to the right. “Left on Tenth” perfectly captures the boredom of being in a hospital, for both patient and visitor.
Before Delia falls ill, Margulies is perky to the point of being robotic. The disease becomes her.
Because I prefer memories of people who have achieved something in life rather than experienced something, I did not know about Ephron’s health problems. While watching “Left on Tenth,” I was only moderately engaged when Gallagher’s Peter finally showed up to court Delia Margulies. Peter is so smitten even before he meets Delia that I thought he must be a stalker, and Ephron’s memoir was about her falling in love and then fending off a real madwoman. How disappointing to learn that I was supposed to swallow this nonsense about her now husband without a bit of irony to wash it away.
It turns out that Piotr is not a pervert. He’s 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 medications a day just to survive. Apparently his doctor forgot to tell him about Descovy a few years ago. Delia also organizes a performance of “Der Rosenkavalier” in Central Park at the Naumburg Bandshell. Maybe “La Boheme.” “Der Rosenkavalier” – never.
