THE ARTS ETC
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New Century Theatre
presents
Dinner with Friends
by Donald Margulies
JULY 14 - 23, 2011
REVIEWED BY DONNA BAILEY-THOMPSON
A PLAY, A REAL PLAY!
What a treat to enjoy a play – a drama for grownups – honored by the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (among others*), a script that deftly exposes feelings stirred up by sudden changes within friendship and marriage, performed by a seasoned cast sensitively directed by Ed Golden.
Playwright Donald Margulies relentlessly invades dark corners where hurt hides, flushing out stark truths that shock, exuding a fear that inhabits not knowing what may happen next to further unsettle what had been a comfortable status quo.
The two seemingly contented couples – Gabe (Sam Rush) and Karen (Kathy McCafferty) best friends for years with Beth (Brianne Beatrice) and Tom (David Mason) – experience an emotional tailspin when Tom tells Beth he wants a divorce. Suddenly, their bonded relationship,12 years of history spanning the mundane to the unthinkable, is blown up. For Tom, his decision brings emotional relief whereas his rejected wife, Beth, feels victimized and seems to undergo all five of Kubler-Ross adjustments simultaneously.
Meanwhile, Gabe and Karen repeatedly secondguess themselves: how could they have been oblivious to their best friends’ mounting anguish? Karen bemoans what she construes as her failure to create with Beth and Tom the family she wished she’d known when growing up. Tom is upset with Beth because she spilled the divorce beans when he wasn’t present and now he contends her act has prejudiced Gabe and Karen’s feelings towards him. That scene reveals how tender the boundary can be between a grown, self-assured adult, in this case an attorney, and his inner child’s whine. He’s so new to adjusting to the division he has wrought that he automatically falls back into old patterns. A verbal fight escalates into a physical struggle which snaps into tumultuous, wordless mutual seduction. Tom and Beth enact Emotional Volatility101.
For Gabe whose love for Karen remains strong enough to carry him through their youthfulness and into her introduction to menopause, his loss is the friendship with Tom, male buddies supporting one another, even silently. Tom has a new love; Beth has rekindled an old love. With her new-found assertiveness, Beth tells Karen, “You needed me to be a mess!”
In a quiet moment, Karen asks Gabe, “Am I intolerant?” and Gabe lobs back, with Sam Rush’s beat-perfect signature touch, “Am I supposed to answer that?”
Dinner with Friends holds up a mirror to our oh-so-human condition: this production glows. Everything works –Jacquelyn Marolt’s minimal set; Emily Justice Dunn’s costumes; Daniel D. Rist’s lighting. The casting seems inspired; all four bring their character’s sensitivity into play. Kathy McCafferty’s Karen is eager to please; Brianne Beatrice’s Beth and David Mason’s Tom go from feel-sorry-for-me to get-out-of-my-way; Sam Rush’s Gabe has the steadying hand.
In his Director’s Note, Ed Golden writes “. . . the play also lays out with uncanny insight the unnerving effect of one marriage on the other. It is this marriage of marriages that is for me the most fascinating motif in the play, intimating as it does that for most of us dependence on others is the stuff of survival.”
Verily!
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Donald Margulies
Playwright - Dinner with Friends
*American playwright and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. His play, Dinner with Friends, received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and other important awards including American Theatre Critics' Association New Play Citation, the Dramatists' Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, the Outer Critics' Circle Award, a Drama Desk award nomination, and was selected a Burns Mantle Best Play of 1999-2000. It went on to have a long run in Paris at the Comedie des Champs-Elysee, and productions in cities all over the world including London, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Tokyo, Mumbai, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Istanbul. In 2001 it was an Emmy Award-nominated film for HBO. Mr. Margulies' other notable works include Time Stands Still (2009), Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (2007), Brooklyn Boy (2004), Sight Unseen (1991) and Collected Stories (1996). The last two were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 and 1997 respectively.
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