Dinner With Friends

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

The fragility of relationships strikes close to home with Donald Margulies’ astonishing, realistic Pulitzer Prize winning play Dinner With Friends. Sizzling with electricity from Robert Kramer’s insightful direction and a tuned in artistic cast, Dinner With Friends graces the Vintage Theatre stage until April 20. Just don’t miss it.

Dinner With Friends. Photo by Ellen Nelson

Humorous, thoughtful, provoking Dinner With Friends entwines itself with an edgy air of delicate discomfort from taking friendship for granted learning to see without looking, learning to hear without listening.

Two couples, long time friends, 12 years to be exact, cocoon themselves with best friend advantages and pride. Karen (Haley Johnson) and Gabe (David Harms) work together as food writers, traveling the world for tasty tidbits. They revel in returning home to entertain Tom (C.J. Hosier) and Beth (Crystal Verdon) with their culinary finds. Gourmet cooks, as well as successful writers, they live breathe, and dance to their meaty accomplishments. On this night, only Beth joins them for dinner with her two children, heard off stage but never seen. Tom’s absence explained as a business trip. Karen and Gabe have just returned from Italy brimming from their experiences, laughing, joking sharing inside information between themselves. If they were paying attention to Beth, they would see something is drastically wrong. If they did pay attention to Beth, the play would abruptly end.

Harms takes on Gabe with a flibberty gibbet fun and games attitude. He hints at the feeling everything can be turned into a joke, sometimes in light-hearted style, sometimes digging into laughter with sarcastic slices. Johnson bubbles with enthusiastic charm over knowledge of cooking expertise, Playing back and forth to each other for the sake of Beth, they miss the painful reactions their friend cannot hide. Verdon is magnificent, revealing the inside hurt of a woman betrayed.

While gushing over the dessert, a lemon-almond-polenta cake recipe Karen and Gabe brought back from Italy, Beth no longer able to hide her truth, dissolves into tears. Tom isn’t on a business trip. He has left her for a younger woman. Rattling Karen and Gabe’s cages, the people they thought they knew so well, a couple with what they thought had the perfect marriage raises questions about their relationship. Gabe laughs harder. Karen becomes consumed over her marriage. How is it possible you can know someone so well, and discover you don’t know them at all? How is it possible what you see when you’re with someone, isn’t what they are like in the confines of their own home? Johnson’s ability to reveal Karen’s internalization of Beth’s problems, making them her own, is a marvel to watch. Facial expressions reveal Karen’s anxious thoughts before the words escape. Gabe clings to raucous joking, hinting at hesitancy to encounter intimacy. Jokes make a great barrier reef. Harms produces a life of the party, but don’t-knock-down-the joke fence persona.

In her bedroom, Verdon unleashes the heart broken loneliness of a woman betrayed in Beth.

Hosier’s uptight, angry persona of Tom crackles when he suddenly appears. His new woman makes him feel alive like he’s never felt before. A screaming match unfolds. Neither listening to the other. Both clutching a laundry list of wrongs created by the other. Neither one able to talk about what they’re feeling, the hurt, the disappointment, the confusion. It’s all about what the other hasn’t done, or has done to create the problem. Wonderfully written in a realistic believable mode, the timing between Verdon and Hosier send shudders throughout the theatre.

Fearful Beth and Gabe will take sides, fearful he will lose out, Tom shows up on their doorstep. Sides, of course, have already been taken. Wanting comfort and reassurance, the lemon-almond-polenta cake takes its own center stage. Food, the joy of it, the need for it, the art of it, the perfection of it, the comfort of it slides in and out of conversations. Karen’s self-esteem, security, and confidence lay with her expertise. Beth’s insecurities, deflated self-esteem, latent hostility and jealousies eventually tumble out into Karen’s lap.

Time melts back 12 years when newlyweds Karen and Gabe arrange for Tom and Beth to come to dinner, to meet, and wouldn’t it be nice if the two could get together? Gabe jokes his way through. Karen tries to keep him corralled. Get together they do, Karen the free spirited artist (Gabe refers to her style as neo-psychotic) and the young lawyer type ready to settle down, fans the spark of pretense between them that will eventually bring them to their knees.

The two couples live in the Connecticut suburbs, in their 40’s, living the life they thought they should live, “growing old and fat together”, being what they thought they should be until middle age sneaks up behind them cracking a whip across the back of their knees.

The scene with Gabe and Tom meeting in a bar after the dust has settled turns the heart inside out. The relationship melts on the floor beneath them. Although their words are words of continuing friendship, getting together, having dinner, Harms and Hosier diligently demonstrate the distance separating Gabe and Tom. As though a sign is hung over their heads, these two will never see each other again.

Because the break up of a marriage takes center stage, the play contains so much more than that. It concerns itself not only with the outside projection of what one wants others to see, but the real inside stuff that all too frequently doesn’t get talked about, doesn’t get communicated. Neither Tom nor Beth grew to the point of asking for what they need. Tom gave Beth everything she asked for. She asked for what she wanted, not what she needed. Although Tom is furious over this, he never asked for what he needed either until it was too late. This crawls into Karen and Gabe’s relationship creating lots of worries and lots of jokes. The zingers wonderfully timed by Harms’ expertise, are honest funny most of the time. Some of the time he wraps himself neatly in joke-protection. Harms’ motivation for Gabe demonstrates a well thought out role.

The chemistry with the actors stands out in the timing and succinct reactions of Gabe and Karen, Tom and Beth. The humor is fun. The expressions of revelation, doubt and confusion are painful at times because their reality speaks truth with direct honesty. The fragility of relationships demand attention. All four characters need to read Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit.

Kramer’s set design fits beautifully into the Vintage Theatre stage with a bedroom that serves for both Karen and Gabe and Beth and Tom in the far stage left corner. The main portion of the stage becomes Karen and Gabe’s kitchen, a house in Martha’s Vineyard, a patio, and a bar in Manhattan. With the six scenes, I was starkly reminded of what unsung heroes Stage Managers really are. Julie Anise Sigala and Katie Betterley in split second timing work their tails off to set up each scene to perfection. Bill Huggins lighting design falls so comfortably into the production it is hardly noticeable, which is always the sign of expert lighting.

This is one production that should not be missed for its honest reality, for the expertise behind the direction, and the remarkable stunning cast who brings it so alive.