Is there still an audience for a show like Left on Tenth, an awkward blend of rom-com and dramedy about a couple of urban boomers that Delia Ephron adapted from her own 2022 memoir? I don’t know if there are enough ladies who lunch, or who at least grab a bite before a Broadway matinee, to pay up to $291 to sit through a genial, female-centric show that Lifetime would reject for lack of dramatic tension.

Julianna Margulies, a winsome actress who hasn’t been on Broadway in nearly 20 years, plays Delia Ephron, an author and screenwriter who collaborated with her filmmaker sister Nora on noteworthy films like You’ve Got Mail. But the former ER star looks mostly stranded on Beowulf Boritt’s set, a two-flapped puzzle box that’s meant to re-create our heroine’s Greenwich Village apartment when it isn’t folding out or in to represent any number of other mostly New York City locations. Throughout the show, she’s stuck mostly as a late-in-life Carrie Bradshaw-style narrator, pacing the stage and flapping her arms as she walks us through her experience as a New York writer of a certain age who loses first her beloved sister and then her soulmate of a husband.

She soon finds herself chatting up a Jungian psychiatrist on the West Coast named Peter who’s also a freshly minted widower. Peter Gallagher, whose character is improbably described as a nonpracticing Jew originally from New York City, twinkles in the role. We would all be lucky if a catch like this happened to catch our eye, even if we’re still grieving someone we considered our one true love. I mean, the guy is a leading authority on sexual harassment, testifying for women in court against their abusers. Even animated Disney princes seem more real.

And then a weird thing happens — or doesn’t. You see, the course of true love has never run as smooth as it does here. Maybe it’s a question of their age — Ephron, now 80, met her husband Peter Rutter when she was in her 70s — and there’s a virtue to seeing older characters fall in love. And even to talk about their sex life, as Delia does here while acknowledging the potential ick factor. “No one wants to hear about older people getting it on,” she says. “I know, from making movies, if you show two older people simply kissing, you want the camera far away, like across the street or out the window. But our attraction was an essential part of the magic.”

That’s all very well and good. But Ephron seems to have forgotten that successful rom-coms require conflict, misunderstandings that threaten to tear the couple apart, and action that drives the plot forward. Instead, we’re forced to watch Delia and Peter sit at desks on either side of the stage exchanging witty, nominally flirtatious emails and texts with each other. They both seem sweet, and sweet on each other, and neither has so much as an irksome quirk or bad habit that gets under the other’s skin. He shakes red pepper flakes onto every dish he eats; she shrugs and crinkles her eyes at him.

The only shadow to emerge in their fairy tale is a medical scare that we know in advance Delia will survive since she wrote a memoir and then the play we’re watching about the experience. Instead of testing this young couple’s relationship, though, the hospital-set final sections of the play merely test our patience. Gallagher’s Peter remains an unwaveringly supportive and stalwart care-giver, while Margulies eagerly embraces meatier dramatic scenes that are closer to her comfort zone than the earlier, lighter fare.

The cast also includes Peter Francis James and Kate MacCluggage, who each play multiple roles (doffing multiple wigs and accents in the process) with impressive aplomb. But the biggest scene-stealer on the stage of the James Earl Jones Theatre is Dulcé, playing Delia’s moppet of a dog, Honey, who hits her marks like a total pro.

Susan Stroman directs.

LEFT ON TENTH
James Earl Jones Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Feb. 2, 2025