November 5, 1999

`Dinner With Friends': A Menu Featuring Divorce And Fear

By PETER MARKS

marriage crumbles in "Dinner With Friends," but it would be difficult to forge a more harmonious union of cast, director and script than the one created at the Variety Arts Theater, where Daniel Sullivan's unflinching production of Donald Margulies's rueful play opened last night.

Margulies, author of "The Model Apartment" and "The Loman Family Picnic," has fashioned a deceptively straightforward suburban comedy. He has chosen the most shopworn of subjects, marital infidelity, and picked as his setting a comfortably banal Connecticut outpost of Sub-Zero refrigerators, one-acre zoning and two-car garages. Yet his take on the denizens of this world is so forthright and clear-eyed that the normal array of yuppie hang-ups as chronicled on television and in the movies are made rawer here, more disturbing. What initially seems a rather conventional glimpse at the perils of breaking up becomes an original examination of the terrors of staying together.

The production, which has been given a gorgeous shelter magazine sheen by the set designer Neil Patel, is as satisfyingly professional as they come, the sort of cozy and expertly acted play that was once a staple of Broadway, the kind that was as dependable as the Oldsmobile in your father's driveway. "Dinner With Friends" may not be scathingly hilarious or blazingly intense, but it has other fine qualities. It is wry and keenly observed and bathed in the unspoken sorrow that can sneak up on you in middle age. It is about the vulnerability everyone experiences as the shadow of time grows longer and the limits of one's choices are more clearly defined.

The package Margulies wraps this in has its funny side, too. The story intertwines the lives of Gabe and Karen (Matthew Arkin and Lisa Emery), world-traveling food writers with a kitchen out of the Martha Stewart handbook, and their close friends Tom (Kevin Kilner), a lawyer, and his wife, Beth (Julie White), whose 12-year marriage is in tatters. Over a dinner to die for at Gabe and Karen's, Beth unburdens herself, though she still can ooh and ah over the lemon almond polenta cake. Margulies's characters practice what one might term culinary couples' therapy: they let a tuile be their umbrella.

This comedy-drama is extremely smart about marriage. When Arkin and Ms. Emery unconsciously fold a bedspread in unison in their cottage on Martha's Vineyard, it is more than the fulfillment of a household obligation; it is a warm commentary on domestic ritual -- the "little things you do together," in Stephen Sondheim's musical phrase -- and on the subliminal teamwork that a good marriage develops. Gabe and Karen are like an Olympic rowing pair, dependent on synchronized strokes. When one's rhythm falters, they're both off their game.

What seriously throws them is the news of the breakup. Beth explains that Tom has found another woman; when in a subsequent scene Tom discovers that Beth has spilled the beans without him present, he rushes over to Gabe and Karen's with his side of the story (and with a hankering for a piece of that polenta cake). It's no different from Beth's version, really, except that Tom declares himself the injured party -- Beth will no longer touch him in casually intimate ways, he complains -- and admits he never had much interest in the rigors of marriage, the ferrying of the children, the never-ending mortgage payments.

These, of course, are nearly universal expressions of the misgivings of middle age; Margulies is concerned with the effect Tom and Beth's opting out has on Gabe and Karen's sense of well-being. In a terrific pair of scenes in Act II, a complex tangle of expectations and self-delusions are laid bare to help demonstrate how tenuous the friendship between the couples really is. Over lunch, Beth announces she has found another man, and Karen registers her disapproval, which infuriates Beth: "You needed me to be a mess," she says. Over drinks, Tom extols the wonders of his new life with a travel agent named Nancy, and it is Gabe who feels betrayed. "We were supposed to grow old and fat together, the four of us," he says.

Sullivan reveals once again how astute and precise he can be with actors; there is not a false moment all evening, and Rui Rita's lighting and Michael Roth's music intensify the bittersweetness the director seeks to bring out. Arkin and Ms. Emery are simply superb in their rendering of a man and woman both settled and unsettled by the strictures of long-term commitment. The imperfections in the marriage are tantalizingly brought close to the surface: Ms. Emery's brittle skittishness nicely masks some unknowable residual anger, and Arkin beautifully conjures a man with sensitive antennae for his wife's strengths and weaknesses.

Ms. White and Kilner have the slightly less interesting couple to play, and both still do extremely well. The actress handles Beth's transformation from basket case to woman in love with grace and ease, and Kilner is particularly strong in the flashback scene in which Tom first sets eyes on Beth -- you watch those eyes and get an education in the mating habits of a ladies' man.

If some people can feel lonely in their own marriage, "Dinner With Friends" asks the question if investing too deeply in someone else's marriage can ultimately make you even lonelier. How fitting that the play ends with a pair of shaken souls clinging to each other in the dark.

DINNER WITH FRIENDS

By Donald Margulies; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Rui Rita; sound by Peter Fitzgerald; music and sound by Michael Roth; production stage manager, R. Wade Jackson; general management, Richards/Climan Inc.; associate producers, Fred H. Krones and Bob Cuillo. Presented by Mitchell Maxwell, Mark Balsam, Ted Tulchin, Victoria Maxwell, Mari Nakachi and Steven Tulchin. At the Variety Arts Theater, 110 Third Avenue, East Village.

WITH: Matthew Arkin (Gabe), Lisa Emery (Karen), Julie White (Beth) and Kevin Kilner (Tom).