Spending an afternoon with Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher didn't turn out to be as pleasant as I expected. There's the kind of engaging senior citizen romantic comedy banter you'd expect from Delia Ephron, but it's sandwiched between an interminable complaint about Verizon--the set up for which begins before the actors ever appear--and a lengthy exposition of the playwright's ultimately successful survival from the same type of leukemia that killed her more famous and talented sister (who also seems not to have been as lucky in love).
Margulies and Gallagher are terrific and director Susan Stroman employs every trick in the book to keep the static story moving, but when a medical device projection provides the most dramatic moment in the play, and you have to resort to not one but two dogs on stage, you know it's a lost cause. While I'm really happy for Ms. Ephron and am thankful for her illustration of Jungian therapy at work, she picked the wrong medium to tell her story.
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