Theatre in Review: Dinner with Friends (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Jeremy Shamos, Marin Hinkle. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

A marriage falls apart in Dinner with Friends, but Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is more interested in the collateral damage caused to the warring couple's best friends. Gabe and Karen, food writers, are serving up one of their patented heavenly meals -- lamb marinated in garlic and oil, risotto, and a really yummy-sounding polenta cake -- to their friend Beth in their suburban Connecticut home. Both genial hosts, they are also more than a little self-absorbed: They are so busy rhapsodizing about the culinary secrets that they unearthed on a recent trip to Italy that they don't notice Beth's fading interest. Only when she bursts into tears does the truth come out: Beth's husband, Tom, having taken up with another woman, has unilaterally and unequivocally declared the end of their marriage.

Gabe and Karen are, to say the least, gob smacked; neither had the tiniest clue that something was wrong between the two people with whom they share most of their free time. They immediately leap into advice-giving mode, urging marital therapy, but Beth isn't having any of it. And, in the following scene, when we see her and Tom locked in a take-no-prisoners psychological battle that slips into fisticuffs followed by furious sex, it seems that Beth has a point; this is no way to run a marriage.

In any case, Tom is livid that Beth has announced the breakup to Gabe and Karen without his being present. "You've got the advantage now," he says, a statement that indicates the battle for custody of their friends is just beginning. Tom has a point, as well; when he shows up to plead his case, he gets the coldest of shoulders from Karen, and Gabe struggles to understand what is happening to his friend.

In any case, Beth and Tom's problems get the once-over-lightly treatment because there are more divorces in the offing. In the play's best scene, a just-us-girls' lunch for Karen and Beth is packed with bombshells that reveal how far they have drifted from an almost sisterly closeness. Beth also reveals a heretofore sheathed set of claws as she admits to how long she has resented Karen's controlling nature. A cocktail hour for the men consists of Gabe, a devoted husband and father, listening in quiet horror to the clichéd details of Tom's standard-issue midlife crisis -- consisting of new clothes, a new exercise regimen, and a new, and much younger, woman. Beth and Tom may be losing each other, but Karen and Gabe are each losing a best friend, and suddenly they don't feel so secure in their own life together.

The idea of a contagious form of marital malaise is interesting, but Dinner with Friends would be more engaging if the characters had more texture to them. They are meant to be average upper-middle-class types -- just like the people in the audience -- but all four lack the little idiosyncratic touches that would give them some individual life. Tom and Beth, in particular, feel like caricatures -- he's an empty-suit corporate lawyer, and she's a ditzy would-be artist -- and each is sufficiently grating that it's hard to see how they lasted together 12 months, let alone 12 years. Similarly, it's hard to believe that Gabe ever had anything in common with the shallow, narcissistic Tom or that Beth has been nurturing a grievance against Karen for more than a decade.

In plays like Sight Unseen and The Model Apartment, Margulies created strongly defined characters who struggled to come to terms with their Jewish heritage. (Think of the Julian Schnabel-type artist in Sight Unseen who courts controversy with his Holocaust-themed paintings, or the elderly couple in The Model Apartment who have unwittingly destroyed the daughter they profess to love.) The characters in Dinner with Friends seemed to have leaped, fully formed, from the author's laptop. They are, I suspect, meant to be universal, but in fact they are rather bland, generic types, good enough for easy, mild jokes about bratty kids and gourmet cuisine but not substantial enough to engage us when they must face more troubling truths. This is despite that fact that Jeremy Shamos, as Gabe, and Marin Hinkle, as Karen, are giving subtly detailed performances that are alert to the slightest change in the emotional weather on stage.

If Darren Pettie is a little off-putting as Tom, it's because the script gives him few opportunities to be anything else. The same is mostly true of Heather Burns' Beth, although she makes the most of her luncheon showdown with Karen. The director, Pam MacKinnon, who most recently gave us a near-definitive version of that epic marital battle Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, does her best with much thinner material, finding telling moments of revelation in an all-too-chilly embrace between Karen and Tom and a stunned pause when the conversation between Karen and Beth suddenly turns hostile. MacKinnon deftly handles the one scene in which all four characters appear, a flashback in which Tom and Beth are introduced during a Martha's Vineyard weekend, under the supervision of Karen and Gabe. Karen, in an assessment that proves wide of the mark, says of Tom, "He's essentially a good guy waiting to happen. He just needs to meet the right woman." When Gabe suddenly experiences qualms about the setup, Karen adds, "What's the worst that could happen?" a line that produces plenty of laughter from the wised-up audience.

If the wheels seem to fall off this quartet's comfy existence all too easily, Dinner with Friends nevertheless climaxes in a haunting scene in which Gabe and Karen begin to probe the previously unacknowledged emptiness at the heart of their own marriage. Why is it, Karen wonders, that they can talk about almost any topic but themselves? The silence that follows, as Gabe struggles to find an answer, speaks volumes.

For an intimate drama, Dinner with Friends makes unusual design demands, and Allen Moyer's set design packs several minimally furnished locations -- kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, and a Manhattan bar -- into a big beige box, an approach that perhaps hints at the emptiness of the characters' lives. The one exception is a stunningly painted backdrop for the Martha's Vineyard flashback, a canvas of rich colors and thick impastos that also features a lovely sunset by the lighting designer, Jane Cox. Ilona Somogyi's costumes are marvels of character observation; each item appears to have been chosen with the greatest of care. Joshua Schmidt's sound design provides good reinforcement for his original music, which includes a nod to the theme from NPR's All Things Considered.

Dinner with Friends ends on a haunting note, with Karen and Gabe in bed facing a future that, despite their best efforts, has suddenly turned frighteningly uncertain. Whatever else one might say about Margulies' play, it's an image that lingers in the mind. The foundation of any marriage isn't just the two people in it, the author seems to say. It is built on children, family, and, most of all, friends. Rattle that foundation, and anything can happen.-- David Barbour