THEATER REVIEW
A rondo for four voices about marriages good and bad, Donald Margulies’ entertaining new play, “Dinner With Friends,” gets a perfect staging at the Variety Arts.
We’re in the Connecticut kitchen of Gabe and Karen, food writers who live the perfect and perfectly appointed life. The couple have just come back from 10 days in Italy; Gabe has made a sublime lemon-almond polenta. Best friend Beth is edgy until she breaks down and confesses hubby Tom is leaving her for a stewardess.
Karen is all angry sympathy and scares Gabe with the ferocity of her judgmentalism. Back home, Beth and Tom have one of those intimately wounding marital fights that end in sex. Worried that Beth has alienated his friends, Tom turns up in the wee hours at Gabe’s, where he seems at least as interested in the polenta he missed as in presenting his side of the breakup.
Three excellent final scenes pair the two women, the two men and the still-married pair. Beth has a new lover and is aglow with happiness; Karen receives this news with a lemon-almond sourness, prompting Beth to say, “You can’t control everything … you love it when I’m a mess. Every Karen needs a Beth.” The two will never be friends again.
Later, Tom regales a stricken Gabe with his new regime of jogging at 5 a.m. and sex in the shower at 6 a.m. (“I’m a boytoy at 43.”) Gabe isn’t buying and says, “I thought we were in this [raising our families] together.” You mean sticking in miserable marriages for 50 years like our parents, retorts Tom. That’s civilization, answers Gabe.
Friendship over.
In bed with Karen, Gabe further articulates his theory that as we go on, “practical matters outweigh abandon.” But both Gabe and Karen clearly yearn for a pinch of abandon in the polenta of wedlock.
Director Daniel Sullivan has never done better work; he deploys stillnesses and small gestures, the ways people sit and stand, to convey the texture of lives. Neil Patel’s gorgeous sets fill the walls with framed, pressed leaves and the shelves with old-New-Englandy artifacts.
The cast is ideal. As Gabe, Matthew Arkin projects a puzzled sincerity that grows into a touching decency. Lisa Emery’s Karen is a unflinching portrayal of tight, blond, coiled, crisp perfectionism intolerant of weakness – yet, somehow, we like her.
Julie White (long a regular on “Grace Under Fire”) nails the ditsiness, insecurity and attractiveness of Beth, while Kevin Kilner (long a regular on “Almost Perfect”) is brilliant as Tom, glibly pouring out justifications for his male-menopausal hedonism and selfishness.
The critic Eric Bentley once accused Paddy Chayefsky of “writing his audience,” telling people what they want to hear. Margulies, with all his talent, does that, also. As in his “Collected Stories,” there’s a sense of issues being sliced up too schematically and comfortably. But it’s churlish to complain about a play and a production so full of life, warmth, laughs and wisdom.
At the Variety Arts Theatre, 110 Third Ave.; (212) 239-6200.
