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
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