How Delia Ephron's Left on Tenth Turned From Real-Life Rom-Com to Living Nightmare—and Now a Broadway Show

“I was basically saved by love, medicine, friendship and dogs.” With a tagline that seductive, you could accuse Delia Ephron of pandering to the Hallmark demographic in her book-turned-stage play Left on Tenth—that is, if it weren’t all true.

Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher play out Ephron’s autobiographical story of love in life’s second act on Broadway, beginning performances September 26 at the James Earl Jones Theatre. At 80 years old, it’s her Broadway debut. But we can’t forget that Ephron crafts meet-cutes by trade—most famously in the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks classic You’ve Got Mail, a romance for the burgeoning internet age that she co-wrote with Miklós László and her late sister Nora (with whom she co-wrote the popular monologue series Love, Loss and What I Wore, which ran off-Broadway from 2009 to 2012).

When, in the wake of her husband Jerome Kass' death, Delia started an email exchange with a nice psychiatrist named Peter, with whom Nora had set her up over 50 years prior (don’t ask her for more details, she doesn’t remember a thing), life began eerily imitating art. “I mean, I wrote You've Got Mail,” she said to Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. “And here I am falling in love on email.”

“I really did think, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve fallen into my own romantic comedy,’” she said, paraphrasing the opening line of her 2017 New York Times op-ed that pre-dated her 2022 memoir. “Then it took a turn.” Ephron was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia, the same cancer that took her sister’s life in 2012. The romantic comedy was, yet again, careering towards tragedy.

Audiences have the comfort of knowing she survived that medical trial, and that her love life worked out pretty well too. But the terrifying uncertainty of that period—one of life’s many “left turns,” as she brands them in her book, and now on stage—nudges her story a bit outside the bounds of a simple will-they-won’t-they caper.

“I don't know if I would classify it exactly as a romantic comedy,” says Ephron, shying away from a genre known for low stakes and predictable turns. She also adds, “Romantic comedies can mess with a woman’s brain.” Case in point, her guilty-pleasure musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: “It's a terrible movie. It's about these men stealing women. It's just awful. And I love it so much.”

An old-fashioned musical theater girl whose party trick is reciting the entirety of West Side Story, Ephron found an ideal creative partner in director-choreographer Susan Stroman—an artist who exudes classic Broadway. In Left on Tenth, Stroman even has her actors break out their tap shoes. “Jerry and I,” Ephron says, remembering her late husband, “for two or three years, we each took private tap lessons and we would occasionally dance together in the bedroom. So there’s a little bit of tap dancing in this play.”

Sounds like something Meg and Tom would do, no? Still, Ephron insists, in this preposterously true story, the rom-com label doesn’t quite fit. “But it has the romance, and it has the comedy, and it has the pain," she qualifies. "It has life. That's what it is.”

Watch The Broadway Show segment below.