Playhouse Tuesdays: Dinner with Friends

Playhouse Tuesdays is a biweekly blog segment highlighting the impact of theater in modern times. By delving into the twists and turns of plays from all genres, Shakespeare and Paula Vogel, I, Erica Wachs, hope to reveal how and why plays hold far greater implications in these times than we might realize at first.

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“Dinner with Friends shouldn’t coddle its audience with a pat happy ending. That is not my intention. The embrace that concludes the play is perhaps not hopeful but ambiguous.” Yikes. A slightly ominous ending to Donald Margulies’ instructions on how to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning dramedy (comedy-drama), I’ll admit. But Mr. Margulies speaks the truth. If anything, reading this play is like waiting for the punch line of a joke, and then just getting punched.

Dinner with Friends tells the story of two couples: Karen and Gabe, and Tom and Beth. Gabe and Karen, two international food writers are giving a dinner for their best friends Tom and Beth (though Tom doesn’t appear in the initial scene) when Beth reports that Tom has left her for another woman. Tom, outraged that Beth has told about their divorce without giving him the opportunity to tell his side of the story, rushes over to explain his deteriorating relationship with Beth. The plot then unfurls to reveal a dinner given twelve and a half years earlier, where Karen and Gabe actually set up Tom and Beth at their house in Martha’s Vineyard.

First of all, I love the structure of this play. From purely a superficial standpoint, I love actors in their forties that get to play young love in their twenties. Delving deeper, I love that Margulies sets up two dinners where two people are at completely different stages of their relationship with each other. The actors who play Tom and Beth are required to play a very complex breakup-sex scene at the end of Act I, and then act as if they’ve never met before at the beginning of Act II. I think writing parallels—or moving the show around in time, really—is a decision always fraught with complications. (This is perhaps best illustrated in most of the shows I write, where the action takes place either during a single day, or over an unspecified amount of time.)

I think this parallel, and the changes in these character’s relationships to each other, speaks to the idea of relationships seen through the lens of the passage of time. And not just the relationships between the two couples. Granted, on first read this show seems like the story of two couples. But really, it’s about four friends who wanted to “grow old and fat” with each other. Beth and Tom both place such importance on telling their side of the story because they want to win over Karen and Gabe in who gets to stay friends with what person. In Act II, there are two specific glimpses into the friendships of Karen and Beth, and Gabe and Tom. The Karen/Beth scene is one of the more dramatic components of the piece, and yet, its purpose is to reassure the audience of their unwavering, if not at times difficult, friendship. Beth accuses Karen of being her friend because she likes to wield control over Beth. She’s right, of course. But they will continue being friends. Gabe and Tom’s scene together is quiet, and doesn’t seem nearly as harsh as the Karen/Beth scene. And yet, in that quiet poignancy, Margulies notes that it is a farewell scene. Their friendship won’t continue any further.

It’s time for some tough love. I recently visited my high school for a young alumnae tea (because it’s classy and delicious). While there, every girl in my excessively small graduating class (52 girls) presented a relationship in high school: my best friends, the girl I wanted to be friends with but didn’t approach, the girl I had every class with but didn’t say a word to. And even in that, the people I was really good friends with left me confused. I found myself struggling through pleasantries and small talk—I would think after all of high school with these people I’d be past small talk! I know five months away from this place that was my home for 13 years isn’t much time, but it was enough to alter my perspectives about the people with whom I spent my time with at school. (And by some twist of dramatic timing, Margulies’ penultimate scene also takes place 5 months after the initial action of Act I.) It’s true, what Margulies writes in his play. Time really does alter the relationships you have with one another. It’s not all bad. There is some comedy in the drama. I found myself laughing with my best friend as if no time had passed at all. Standing in the middle of that tea, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my relationships with these people were without hope—the stakes of our lives are not high enough for that. But for many, they were ambiguous.

#playhousetuesdays #ericawachs