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.
