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I joked that I had fallen into my own romantic comedy. Peter, a man I had briefly dated 54 years before, emailed me after I wrote a New York Times op-ed about losing my husband and battling Verizon when I tried to shut down his phone. Peter and I fell in love in an exchange of emails bouncing between opposite coasts—me in New York City, he in the San Francisco Bay Area. But the stakes almost instantly became much bigger. Three months into this new relationship, I was diagnosed with a fierce and often fatal leukemia.
Peter flew east the same night. He proposed. We got married in the hospital.
After I miraculously survived, I knew, being a writer, that I had been given a gift. A story. I could write it. And if I didn’t write it, I suspected that I would never get past the trauma of the diagnosis and memories of the difficult cure.
Everyone I know over 50 has had some experience with illness and loss—big, little, their own, a family member, a friend. I believe that nearly everyone who survives a serious disease has PTSD. In the over-50s, it is rampant. And the need for love and laughter is as strong as ever. I believed that my story could resonate and give more people reason to hope.
In translating something personal into something that would move other people, I wrote about how love alters an experience; how different later-in-life love is, yet every bit as joyful and sexual as falling in love had been when I was young. I wrote about friendship and how it had buoyed me.
While I was writing Left on Tenth as a memoir, I suspected that it could also be written as a play. Being a dramatist, writing novels and movies, I knew that what I had lived through had all the ingredients a good story needs: loss, love again, threat, joy. Peter was a fantastic hero, leukemia a frightening foe. And I knew also that I could find ways to make it funny. I gave the memoir to the theater producer Daryl Roth, who had produced a play that I had written with my sister Nora Ephron: Love, Loss, and What I Wore. Daryl produces plays of all sorts, but she especially loves women’s stories and stories of substance. She agreed that it was suited to adaptation and suggested Susan Stroman to direct.
Susan Stroman is a brilliant director as well as a choreographer, the winner of many Tony Awards. Most often she directs musical theater. I was raised on musicals: The first one I saw was Guys and Dolls. I was about 6 years old and didn’t understand it, but whenever a Broadway musical came to Los Angeles, where I grew up, my parents took us to see the show. Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific. I can still recite lines from West Side Story: “Where you going to find ’Nardo?” “At the dance tonight, at the gym.” “But the gym’s neutral territory…” And so forth. I can’t carry a tune, but I belted out show tunes when I was a kid. Meeting Susan Stroman was a thrill for me.
Left on Tenth isn’t a musical, but Daryl had recently seen the play Dot, about a family’s dealing with illness, which Stroman had directed, and she felt that Stroman would know how to tell my story. Daryl also knew that Stroman’s husband, director Mike Ockrent, had died of the same disease that I had battled, so my story would be personal to her. Stroman and I acknowledged that in our first meeting. We haven’t discussed it a lot, only now and then, but the understanding is there, a bond underlying the collaboration. Personal, in my opinion, often brings out the best. To have a real-life experience, a trauma in this case, and make something out of it…it’s an action that repairs the wound, helps others, spreads joy. This out of that.
Susan Stroman is called Stro. Everyone who knows her calls her Stro. I couldn’t imagine doing that. This sounds disingenuous, but it is true. I asked her in our first meeting if I had to call her Stro. She said yes, I did. It took a while. I was tripping over it, saying “Susan” and then correcting myself, embarrassed if I said to a friend: “Stro thinks…” or “According to Stro…” It was as if I was showing off. Maybe I was.
Because Stro is musical, and because when collaboration works, each person gets stuff from the other, there is music in our play, and also some tap dancing. Jerry, my late husband, and I tap-danced. We loved it. So working with Stro, I thought, Why not a bit of that? So into the play it went.
When I was a child, storytelling was a big deal at family dinners. My parents, who were screenwriters, were raising writers, almost as a mandate. All four of us sisters became writers. “That’s a great line, write it down,” my dad would say. “That’s a great title, write it down.” I’ve spent my life writing down titles before I knew what they went with. “Left on Tenth” was something I came up with years ago. I live on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, and when I get off the subway, left on Tenth is my way home. Like all good titles, it had metaphors tucked into it. When my life took many left turns—some perilous, some wondrous—that title became meaningful to me. It’s as if my imagination was ahead of my life.
Having a play on Broadway was not a dream of mine. It was too big, actually. When I was a young writer in a family of writers, I set modest goals for myself. My first book was a craft book, The Adventurous Crocheter. A while later I did a book of humor, How to Eat Like a Child, in which I discovered my “voice.” Then I tried to master essays. I’ll try a novel next, I thought. Each form was harder than the previous. Because my sister Nora wanted to be a director and needed a screenwriting collaborator, and because for a while I lived in Los Angeles, where every writer is tempted by the magic and misery of screenwriting, I joined up with her and learned screenwriting. But Broadway…
I began doing drafts of the play, meeting with Stro and rewriting with her notes. The play developed over a couple of years and the cast fell into place, Julianna Margulies as me and Peter Gallagher as Peter. I had met Julianna in a magical way. I was reading her memoir, Sunshine Girl, and I realized that she lived in Greenwich Village. I thought, We live near each other. I wonder why I’ve never seen her? That afternoon…that very afternoon…I was walking my dog, and my dog sniffed another dog, and I looked to see who was walking it, and it was Julianna. So I introduced myself, and when I had written this play, I knew she was perfect for it.
We did a two-week workshop in a loft space on 42nd Street. On every floor of the building, it seemed, a different Broadway show was rehearsing. Out the window I had a view of Madame Tussauds wax museum. Next door was a shop with every kind of mug or T-shirt a tourist might want.
A workshop is when the director sets the play on its feet. Every day I saw Stro bring scenes to life. I saw her teach Julianna Margulies to tap-dance. I got to watch myself fall in love, almost die, and survive. Peter Gallagher asked me, “Are you all right? How is this for you?” And I thought, This out of that. This creative, joyful experience out of that trauma…That I lived to write it, to experience the making of this play. And it is such a happy play.
All the men involved in this play are named Peter. My Peter: Peter Rutter. Broadway Peter: Peter Gallagher. And our other amazing actor, who plays all the other male parts in the play: Peter Francis James. It’s quite confusing and magical. My Peter…how did he react to finding himself in a play perhaps headed to Broadway? He is, I should point out, retired. He’s a psychiatrist, a Jungian psychoanalyst, so if he hadn’t been retired, the exposure of his personal life would have been difficult-to-impossible. But at this time in his life, it is a fantastic adventure. He’s a man of unfettered curiosity. He’s written two books about sexual harassment. He’s testified in court on behalf of abused women. And he also knows that returning to this time of my life—packed with sadness, fear, and absolute joy—is healing for me and many others. He also happens to be a terrific writer, and his emails to me when we were falling in love are in the play. His unfaltering dedication and care when I became sick are also dramatized. It’s “this out of that” for him as well.
Once we had the workshop and the cast, all we needed was a theater. The play is intimate, so a large theater for a musical wouldn’t do. We needed something more intimate. The Shuberts own most of those theaters, I learned. Would they give us one?
The email from Daryl Roth arrived: We’re opening at the James Earl Jones in October. I was so happy, I started crying.
Left on Tenth begins previews on September 26. It opens on October 23.