Dinner with Friends
The play moves around in time but centers on dinners (and other
meals) among two couples: Gabe and Karen (Jeremy Shamos and Marin Hinkle) and
Beth and Tom (Heather Burns and Darren Pettie). Gabe and Tom have been friends
since college; Gabe and Karen have been married for about 13 years; Beth and
Tom have been married for 12 years. We meet them all throughout act one, as
both connections and rifts are revealed. Kicking off act two is a flashback to
the summer when Beth and Tom met, having been set up by Gabe and Karen (this
scene is the only time all four are on stage together, and it’s vital to fully
understanding the characters and the dynamics between all four). We then jump
back to the present and continue to see how many people are actually in one
relationship.
And that’s the crux of it. As Karen says to Gabe early in
the play, “You don’t know what couples are like when they’re alone.” What’s so
interesting about Dinner with Friends
is that Margulies allows us to look in on pairs—not just the married couples
but different permutations of the four—and examine what it takes to make a
relationship work. Or, what it means to admit that a relationship is not
working.
Throughout, the game cast embodies the characters and their
struggles, which are brilliantly articulated by Margulies’s natural,
well-observed dialogue. Tony Award-winning director Pam MacKinnon (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Clybourne Park) complements the writing with
small but powerful moments and juxtapositions, as in when Gabe and Karen wrap
their arms around each other just moments after Beth and Tom, alone in their
bedroom, couldn’t have been standing farther apart. Still, it all comes back to
Margulies (Collected Stories, Time Stands Still), who keenly captures
the minutiae of different relationships and, more specifically, the impact
friends’ relationships have on your own.
Early on, we learn that Beth and Tom are divorcing, and for
the rest of the time spent in the present, Gabe and Karen are left questioning
their own relationship. All of a sudden, something they thought they never had
to think about—something that happens to other people—is staring them in the
face and it’s scary. Beth and Tom make, separately, cogent arguments for
separating, leaving Gabe and Karen to wonder about the virtue of the work they
put into their own marriage.
They also struggle to maintain their relationship with Beth
and with Tom. (That struggle is brilliantly realized by Shamos (Clybourne Park, The Assembled Parties) and Hinkle, who give stunning, devastating performances.)
As we get older, and people change and move around, do we move on from
friendships? Do we include in our circle only those who see the world as we see
it? What about our friends and lovers who challenge us? Do we exclude them
because facing something different is too scary?
So many questions. Those provocations and more are among the
reasons this has long been one of my favorite plays (and Margulies a favorite
playwright), and why, even though it was written over a decade ago (and adapted
for the small screen by HBO) it still resonates today. Challenging or
otherwise, human nature doesn’t change. Dinner with friends is always messy.
Dinner with Friends is
scheduled to run through April 13. Visit Roundabouttheatre.org for more information
and to purchase tickets.
Comments
Post a Comment