Marital Twitters: Donald Margulies’ Dinner with Friends at The Schoolhouse Theater

 

David Begelman

Dinner with Friends is about two couples whose separate marriages go in different directions. It won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and recapitulates all the clichés it is possible to track in marital relationships that seem to be going well or are already on the rocks. That playwright Donald Margulies, author of Sight Unseen and Collected Stories, depicts this with at least a modicum of humor in a script that more or less sustains an audience’s attention, says something about his writing ability.

The playwright has a flair for dialogue brimming with yuppie sensibility. At the opening of the play, two of the partners in his drama, Karen and Gabe, have invited their friend Beth to dinner. Before the conversation takes a somber turn, Beth marvels at Karen’s talents in the kitchen, although the latter fears she may have overcooked the pumpkin risotto. She also wonders whether she should have beaten the eggs a bit more when preparing the lemon cake with polenta.

These culinary perseverations should alert any anthropologist opting to catalogue a primal rite of discourse over food and wine in this social set. In some groups, the patter inevitably continues unabated even through the most perilous of circumstances, like hurricanes or earthquakes. No meat and potatoes crowd, this. More likely than not, you’ll also find it watching a sunset rather than a baseball game, just as the couples do in Act 2, Scene 1, when Karen and Gabe introduce Beth to Tom for the first time.

Of course, there are cracks in the veneer. Karen, (played convincingly by Quinn Cassavale as a somewhat prissy and controlling wife), takes an occasion to scream upstairs to kids making noise while watching television. The stridency of her tone has a Bronx tenement, not Martha’s Vineyard, ring to it. But household manners are, for the most part, scrupulously consistent. Which means that when things go awry in a marriage in this crowd, it’s dollars to donuts the problem is pretty nearly always one of communication, or the frustration of unspoken latent need  (as in Act !, Scene 2, when Beth and Tom have at each other). Donnybrooks with flying beer bottles would be decidedly out of character for these folks.

Beth and Tom’s meltdowns are, accordingly, bouts of fury that have natural limits. But those of Karen and Gabe by contrast could have been packaged in Bloomingdale’s. Gabe (played with a marital devotion that sometimes verges on cowering) is especially wary of ruffling the occasionally snippy Karen.  

In the middle of the sedate Act 1, Scene 1 repartee between Beth (played emotionally, and with sudden bursts of tempestuousness by Jolynn Baca), Karen and Gabe, Beth suddenly starts crying uncontrollably. The reason is that her marriage to her husband Tom (played as a spouse struggling to come out of his marital cocoon of unrequited need) has broken down irreparably. The remainder of Dinner with Friends includes scenes between Karen and Gabe, Beth and Tom, Karen and Beth, Gabe and Tom, and a flashback scene when the married couple introduces Tom to Beth at the outset of what will later prove to be a doomed relationship.

All manner of explanation for the rift between Beth and Tom is explored by Karen and Gabe, with a scarcely concealed nervousness about the implications it has for their own marriage. Gabe finally muses about what can happen when “practical matters outweigh abandon,” while Karen poses the searching question, “Don’t you ever miss me, Gabe?” All because what Beth and Tom have been through comes to shatter complacency about a marriage Karen and Gabe thought was as solid as anything could be.

Well, between considering the piety that it’s never wise to be overly smug about anything in a relationship, and the truism that if things don’t work out it’s best to split, there’s not much wiggle room for other options, anyhow. So what’s the literary point of Dinner with Friends? To rehearse two scenarios for audiences so they can wonder which one they are in? There is little here that is imaginative in the way of dramatic conflict. It’s pretty much the same old stuff we’ve heard time and again—off stage and on.

Director Pamela Moller Kareman does a credible job organizing the interplay among four actors who turn in distinct and contrasting interpretations of their roles. Quinn Cassavale as Karen and Steve Perlmutter radiate a conviction about the durability of what they have together, before the dissolving relationship of two friends gives them pause to question their staid thing. Jolynn Baca as Beth and Christopher Yates as Tom battle each other and their uncomprehending friends with verve before they both see newer possibilities in their separate lives.

Ken Larson’s scenic design was a bit on the slapdash side, and forfeited accommodation to the action so that darkened scene changes could avoid seeming awkward and prolonged.   

Dinner with Friends opened at The Schoolhouse Theater, 3 Owens Road, Croton Falls, NY 10519 on May 14, 2009, and runs until June 7, 2009. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 914-277-8477, or online at www,schoolhousetheater.org.

 

Published in Citizen News, May 20, 2009