A dinner party becomes the occasion of a divorce announcement as guest Beth tells hosts Gabe and Karen that her husband Tom has left her after a dozen years, which included having kids together. Up to now, the couples have been close friends, but the divorce makes them reconsider their relationships with their friends and each other.
In Dinner with Friends, playwright Donald Margulies cleverly takes the story from the kitchen announcement and aftermath of the break-up in Act I to Act II and the beginning of the to-be-doomed romance and marriage. How each couple contributes to marriage, both their friends‘ and their own, either predicts or astonishes us in view of our having seen what the future brings.
When Tom finds out about the announcement, he’s upset that Beth (Liz Launey, deserving sympathy yet a bit weak showing reasons for this), being first to tell of the divorce, gained an advantage over him viz-a-viz their friends. It’s telling that attractive but given-to-mumbling Eddie Simon as Tom seems as annoyed about missing a gourmet dinner as about the breakup. Meanwhile, in their bedroom that night, Gabe and Karen are disturbed about how they missed the signs and seem to ponder their own marital situation. Do they have a fond good-night?
Leon Contavesprie as Gabe and Chelle Duke as Karen, the stable couple, work so well together that it’s hard to believe they’re not a long-married couple. Each of them sometimes dominates--Karen as the staunch traditionalist stay-at-home wife, mom, Cook (capital intended) or Gabe as the one who wonders about how his life and theirs adds up as compared to their friends’. At times she comes close to being smug and bossy, but real love comes through. Leon Contavesprie makes us always feel he cares for her and his children, which is the point of his life.
Food plays an important part in the couples’ lives. What Karen and Gabe served and Tom missed is almost as major a concern of Tom (handsome Eddie Simon) as the fact that Beth beat him to telling of the divorce. To Tom, that gave her an advantage over him in winning their friends’ sympathy and even approval of her view of the split.
Simon is a bit too hang-dog in Act I, sometimes speaking to his feet, but he’s more appealing in the later earlier scenes with Beth. Liz Launey makes Beth rather weak both times, though she looks good enough to have attracted Tom.
The production of Dinner with Friends is well lit and costumed, but the scenery is rather cheesy, even granted Karen and Gabe’s status, early in their marriage. The house is, after all, on Martha’s Vineyard but inside looks like rooms in a roadside motel. Their kitchen and bedroom are better off when they are, though. Amanda Francis has stage managed and chosen fine props for the 1 hour, 45 minute show.
Director Rene J F. Piazza shows her familiarity with the play by moving things along surely and steadily. The show tells a lot about how modern Americans take on (and off) marriage.
