Theatre in Review: Left on Tenth (James Earl Jones Theatre)

	Peter Gallagher, Julianna Margulies. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Left on Tenth, billed as a romantic comedy, only fulfills half that description; indeed, its greatest achievement may be to unite the audience in its hatred of Verizon's call-in service. Not just Verizon but any corporate entity that leaves one hanging for indefinite periods, offering useless advice in robotic tones or, cutting out altogether, sending one back to square one. Before the show begins, sound designer Jill BC DuBoff fills the theatre with a nonstop medley of Verizon hold music and messaging, all guaranteed to make the strong weep.

Ironically, Delia Ephron's murderous frustration with Verizon brings her unexpected, late-in-life love. Following the death of her husband, the screenwriter Jerome Kass, she has his landline disconnected. It is her final act of letting go, not achieved without a psychological cost; adding to her angst, those peerless folk at you-know-what company also took down her Internet. Trying to get this error corrected she enters the Kafkaesque labyrinth of long phone waits, fruitless service calls, and, with nothing achieved, cheerful requests for customer feedback. She reaches that special circle of hell that leaves one screaming "Agent! Agent!" into the phone with the desperation of someone calling 911.

Ephron gets her revenge in an amusing rant on the New York Times' op-ed page, which is read by Peter Rutter, a San Francisco-based psychotherapist with whom she had several dates in 1961. (To her embarrassment, she doesn't recall them, although one was at the opening of Take Her, She's Mine, a hit Broadway comedy by her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the college years of her sister Nora.) Peter contacts Delia, she responds, and soon emails are flying back and forth as befits the woman who co-wrote (with Nora) the film You've Got Mail. "I wrote several [romantic comedies]," she notes. "And here I was, imagining that I had landed into one."

If I seem to be taking time before getting to the point, you should see Left on Tenth, which dawdles badly in its first half, contenting itself with wry references to Zabar's, Bumble, Barney's, and Delia's longtime obsession with the MGM musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. (Some romantic comedy that is, featuring as it does a mass abduction and several-month-long hostage situation; to each her own, I guess.) It's all very sweet, smooth, knowing (especially for a New York audience), and not quite fit for the stage. What with Delia's increasingly intimate correspondence with Peter and her check-in sessions with various girlfriends sizing him up, Left on Tenth, based on Delia's memoir of the same name, would seem more at home as one of those lengthy, lightly amusing glossy magazine essays that the Ephron girls (Delia, Nora, and Amy) have long churned out in industrial numbers.

The real point of Left on Tenth is that Delia's romantic comedy turns out to be nothing of the kind when, soon after meeting Peter, she is diagnosed with a form of leukemia like the one that killed Nora. This is where the play drastically shifts gears and an amiable, rather wandering entertainment suddenly becomes emotionally binding. A growing intimacy, likely to grow fruitfully over time, is suddenly tested under the most stressful circumstances. As it happens, Peter, a Jungian with a lust for life in all its joys and sorrows, is the ideal partner to guide her through a near-death experience set off by an experimental treatment that comes with ghastly side effects. In the most gripping sequence, Peter furiously coaxes Delia back to life after her oxygen monitor shows numbers dropping below the survival level. More ironic than any of the script's witticisms is that only when the play drops its aggressively ingratiating ways to focus on life-and-death matters does it become truly involving.

In a season that sees boulevard comedy back in force on Broadway, one can be grateful for Susan Stroman's production, which ensures that even the weakest portions of Left on Tenth go down easily. As Delia, Julianna Margulies deftly makes the audience her collective confidant, recalling growing up with "worship of the written word," in a house of "angry alcoholics," and finding her "first true home" with Kass. (The sum total of her mother's life advice: "Pick one hairdo and stick to it.") Not that the actress is content to coast on her considerable charm: Having been (mostly) happily dominated by Nora, Delia fears, irrationally, that they must inevitably share the same fate. Falling into despair while hospitalized, exhausted and in pain from her treatment, she begs for death; Margulies rises to the challenge of this sequence, showing Delia dangling, convincingly, on just this side of the grave.

There are few leading men of his generation as debonair as Peter Gallagher, and he applies every bit of his scruffy charm to the role of Peter, who, in Delia's telling, is the Platonic ideal of a mensch. (Apparently, his only flaws are a love of opera and an overreliance on red pepper flakes when seasoning his meals. Hey, nobody's perfect!) Crucially, he manages to be convincing when explaining the Jung-inspired concept that life is worth living only when we feel everything: "It's the difference between experiencing a partial solar eclipse and a total solar eclipse. 'Almost' totality doesn't cut it. 'Point-five-percent less' doesn't cut it. For absolute beauty, for the joy, you have to experience totality."

Keeping the wardrobe department busy are Peter Francis James, coming and going as, among others, a gay neighbor with wisdom to impart, a chilly optometrist, a kindly cancer specialist, and Kate MacCluggage as Delia's peanut gallery of supportive/skeptical friends, most notably the doctor who oversees her treatment. Each of Jeff Mahshie's costumes is a complete character study, and MacCluggage sports a dizzying array of wigs by Michael Buonincontro. For these highly literate proceedings, Beowulf Boritt has designed a library, packed with pastel books, which revolves to become a hospital interior. The set is backed by beguiling watercolor images of Greenwich Village, starry skies, green English fields, and desert vista courtesy of projection designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. Lighting designers Ken Billington and Itohan Edoloyi provide an array of looks -- warm interiors, moonlight night washes, and clinical atmospheres -- as needed. DuBoff's sound design delivers jazz piano interludes, a saxophone rendition of "The Very Thought of You," the Natalie Cole classic "This Will Be," and Barbara Cook's soulful rendition of "Ship in a Bottle" -- and, of course, the melody of "Bless Your Beautiful Hide" from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Is there room in Broadway's current high-pressure environment for a slender, amiable, chatty get-together, graced with an exquisitely polished production, about hard-won love in life's latter stages? It's hard to say, but if you don't mind a piece that, for its first half, proudly wears its mild manner, Left on Tenth may eventually guide you to tears. As a comedy, it is less than satisfying; as a romance, it aims for the heart and scores a bull's-eye. --David Barbour