I find that upon the advent of its first New York revival, what I have to say about this deserving Pulitzer Prize play has not changed at all since I reviewed its off Broadway debut in 1999, except for certain production particulars. So with your indulgence, a little recycling, with updates:
It’s probably
some variation of one Worst Nightmare or another. There you are, playing host
to one of your best friends, who happens to be married to one of your other
best friends…and suddenly you find out she and he are getting divorced.
That, indeed, is
where Donald Margulies’ play Dinner
With Friends begins,
as Gabe (Jeremy Shamos) and
Karen (Marin Hinkle) sort out
their reactions as Beth (Heather Burns) breaks down in their kitchen and blurts out the news that her husband
is leaving her for another woman, just before dessert. Later that evening,
Beth’s husband Tom (Darren Pettie)
returns home from a business trip, learns about what happened at dinner and
freaks: The plan had been to tell their friends together, but now he fears all
the sympathy has gone to “her side.”
I’m loathe to
describe too much of the rest of the play, because it’s freshly enough
conceived to have its surprises honored. Suffice to say that when it threatens
to be schematic and predictable, it is anything but; and what would seem to be
a light comedy about friendship and shifting loyalties, becomes instead a
surprisingly touching rumination about the changes that come with age: the
changes redefining relationships, the
changes within relationships, the
impact new relationships have on old, and the balances and affections that
shift unexpectedly, just because, despite our reluctance to want to accept it,
life goes on.
Under the
confidently unobtrusive direction of Pam MacKinnon, the cast could hardly be bettered, not only in the
playing, but in the casting, the conjoining of persona and role: Marin Hinkle
as the severe conservative wife, resenting the infidelity of her friend’s
husband in some ways more than the friend herself; Jeremy Shamos as the sweet,
faithful husband, who finds the dissolution of the best-friend marriage too
frightening to contemplate except through a kind of bewildered abstraction from
it; Heather Burns as the newly-abandoned wife, funny, scattered, desperate and
angry, often in alternating breaths; and finally Darren Pettie, as the husband
who has left; a rogue so good at playing innocent that he has himself
convinced, which is the magic behind his being able to convince others.
“Dinner With
Friends” is a low-key sleeper, but there’s something very serious going on
behind the understatement, and, like any consequential relationship—whether
it be one that works or one that falls apart—it has the capacity to
become a part of you and figure into the way you look at these things, forever
after, amen.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page