Customer Reviews

Dinner with Friends

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Donald Margulies' "Dinner with Friends" received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, a well-deserved award. The play deals with two couples who have been close for a long time, but now one couple is going through a divorce. Throughout the play, relationships are questioned and reorganized. The still-married couple find themselves assessing the strength of their own relationship and mourning the little corner of their world which dies when their friends divorce.

"Dinner with Friends" is a rare gem--a questing, moral play that takes an honest look at the issues of commitment and fidelity in today's world. I don't think I've seen a new play which delved so deep and true into the heart of an everyday issue, and with everyday characters, since David Mamet's "Oleanna." The last two scenes bare the relationships and souls of the characters so fully (and, thankfully, without overt hysterics) that I literally got the chills.

In scene three of the second act Gabe meets his friend Tom a few months after Tom and his wife have split. Tom is living with his travel agent girlfriend, and Gabe quickly tires of Tom's rationalizations and his descriptions of the fantasy life he has constructed around himself. Tom talks fanatically about his newfound freedom, and Gabe tells him he's starting to sound "like a Moonie." Gabe finally voices the essential problem he has with Tom's decision to leave his family. Gabe says, "The key to civilization, I think, is fighting the impulse to chuck it all." Then Tom tries to tell Gabe that maybe Gabe's own marriage isn't all that it appears to be; Tom has heard Gabe complain in the past, and Tom says that he knows the signs of trouble. The difference between the two men, however, is that Gabe believes in working at his marriage and cannot imagine ever giving up. "You don't get it," Gabe says. "I _cling_ to Karen; I _cling_ to her. Imagining a life without her doesn't excite me, it just makes me anxious."

The euphoric and blissful bubble that a functioning relationship can father is a wonderful thing. When two individuals are linked by common interests, shared ideals and beliefs, nothing in respects to a career, money or fame can come close to it; it is a wonderful, natural high to experience true love. However, what happens when a marriage does not work and the foundation that eventually led to that marriage was an erroneous one? In Dinner With Friends, playwright David Margulies explores just such a situation.

We have two couples, Beth and Tom and Karen and Gabe, all somewhere in their forties and all the best of friends; the former couple, Tom in particular, has grown rather weary about his workaday existence as a lawyer. His energy for life has waned dramatically, and who does he pour his blame on? His artist wife Beth. She in turn blames him for not being open enough. Thus, the blame game starts to take root. The latter couple, Karen and Gabe, get woven into this battle due to their friendship, a friendship that slowly begins to crack when they try to comprehend the depth of their friend's unhappiness, i.e. the banal conversations, the duty of paying off a mortgage, the raising of kids, etc. It is essentially the story of four baby-boomers who do not like the turn their lives are taking. One couple breaks up, and in the process of doing so, they almost develope a 'plastic' or 'artificial' Ken and Barbie personality, that because I'm divorced now I jog more and have better sex. An arrogant happiness developes. That artificiality affects Karen and Gabe deeply, because they debate if their friendship was one of a genuine nature. The good times of the past are no more, so what is there to look forward to?

Karen and Gabe are scared at the transition that their 'old' friends took, for if it happened to Tom and Beth, it could happen to anyone. And therein is where the power of this play lies: that divorce can happen to anyone.

In its own right the play is smartly written: vibrant, sharp, stinging, fast-paced and edgy. A smart, wry drama about an unpleasant and common issue.

Last season's foursome relationship play, Closer, by Patrick Marber, has many deserving admirers, but I'm partial to Dinner with Friends, and not just for the Pulitzer award, or because it's an American play, not British. What Margulies does so deftly is create individuals, couples, and friendships, all of which are distinct entities ... in a play that shows great insight into my generation's struggle with intimacy. Reading or watching the play I find myself hating the divorcing couple, yet unable to dismiss them. They are fully credible characters, acting out of clearly realized inner needs. I would recomment Donald Margulies' play to anyone who appreciates subtle realsim, peppered with subtle insight and humor.

I found the author's treatment of middle-aged crises and divorces a bit trite and stereotypical. It reads just like any other situation I've seen in movies, real life, etc. Being a baby boomer myself, with friends who have divorced and some of them for similar reasons, I didn't think Mr. Margulies had any terrific insights into the situation.

He definitely created four distinct personalities, and none of them were solely "the good guy" or "the bad guy", but I think, based on the reviews I'd read before reading this play, and based on seeing a performance of "Collected Stories", I expected more. I think "Collected Stories" was far more deserving of a Pulitzer.

This is an emotionally charged, witty, and brilliantly told drama of four friends struggling to understand marriage, divorce, intamacy, and each other. One of the best plays I've seen/read.

"Dinner with Friends" by Donald Margulies is a play with some very telling lines, with four yuppy friends (two couples) having seismic marital stress at homes in Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard. They are not a very likeable bunch. They're self-absorbed and frivolous people. The two men Tom and Gabe have known each other for twenty-four years since their college days. Gabe and his wife Karen, annoying and cloying foodies, are the ones who introduced Tom and Beth.
When the play starts Tom and Beth have been married for twelve years, have two children, but they are splitting up. If forced to list the characters in levels of obnoxiousness, Tom would have to come at the top of the list followed by Beth, then Karen, and ending up the pack would be Gabe. They all seem like very vain, snobbish brittle people.
Gabe is a rather passive person, and his wife Karen is more of an activist, almost a control-freak as some character in the play describes her. The break-up of Beth and Tom's marriage sends shock waves under Gabe and Karen's, in a way threatening its survival.
Beth is called high-strung. When she finds a new friend that she wants to marry in place of Tom, she says to Karen, "you need me to be a mess; you're invested in it. Every Karen needs a Beth." A great line. Beth goes on to say, "We can't all be like you, Karen. God knows I've tried. No matter how much I stir, my soup still sticks to the pot."
I must admit that I never saw the play performed, and good actors can change your perceptions of the characters and the play enormously. Some character who come off poorly in the reading can win you over in the performance. It's a well-constructed, well-written play, but when you don't care that much for the people in it, you can't get emotionally involved.
The character of tightly-bound Tom is the catalyst for the play's action, and his treatment of wife Beth seems brutal and abusive. Wild card Tom says, "rage can be an amazing aphrodisiac."
The play starts off in a predictable arc because you can guess that Beth's distraction is due to trouble in her marriage, but it becomes more original and inventive as it evolves.
There are some echoes of Albee in all this. Margulies wrote the more recent four-character play "Time Stands Still" which I reviewed for Amazon. It also has two couples who are on different tracks in life. I think "Time" is a better play.

Dinner with Friends is an interesting, if seriously disturbing. Revolving around two couples that believe themselves extremely close, the play begins with news that Beth and Tom have separated and that Tom has run off with his travel agent. The story that ensues paints all of the characters in an incredibly believable way in which nobody is completely honest, everyone believes that they are right, and the boundaries of friendship for everyone are clearly defined.

As a twenty-five year old man, I found it incredibly disturbing how truly Margulies was able to capture the middle aged experience. The logic of the characters evolution is flawless, and paints a rather grim future for all of us that believe that we're in love and know who our true-blue friends are.

If you haven't read Dinner With Friends, you won't be disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed it...great plot, great dialogue, great characters, and a bittersweet ending. Definitely a good choice.

This is by far one of the most engaging plays that I have read recently. Margulies creates realistic characters, who, in middle-age, find themselves questioning everything in their lives they thought was real. Anyone who has been married for any length of time can certainly relate to some of the thematic questions of this play. What is the meaning of commitment? Can marriages endure a lifetime? How are long term friendships effected when a marriage fails? Dinner with Friends is a deceptively simple, yet deeply moving play.

Margulies's play is interesting, but certainly not deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. The analyzation of characters is fairly sterotypical at times. In other instances, character portrayal is simply poor, as I find with Gabe. Gabe, at times, seems to border on being the "foppish" stock character of classical comedy; in the second act, however, he becomes more serious, seeming to deviate from his previous personality traits.

Also, elements of the play are unrealistic. For instance: rage can be an aphrodisiac, but two people who are physically beating each other do not make such a quick transition to love-making as Margulies suggests. Also, Margulies's use of conversation is not believable. Characters are always interrupting each other, which is certainly true in real life. However, in this play they do it constantly, and nobody ever seems to notice. The characters do not become upset at each other, despite the fact that other characters continually interrupt them.

An interesting play, certainly. But not nearly as good as one would believe, considering its awards.