The Dinner party

Love and marriage at the Public Theatre

By Katherine Joyce

Dinner with Friends shows at the Public Theatre, in Lewiston, through Feb. 3. Call (207) 782-3200.

FRIENDS FOREVER: the Public Theatre tackle Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer winner.

There are different categories of friends. Sometimes friendships fall into more than one category, but the categories remain, nonetheless. Old friends, those from childhood and college. Couples friends, those with whom we socialize. With any luck, those couples friendships become individual friendships as well.

Then there are the couples friends who seem to mirror your life path: They get married and have children within a few years of you; they go on trips and celebrate holidays with you; your children get along. You become a family that you have constructed of your own volition.

The disappointment comes when you discover that, as playwright Donald Margulies notes, this family is just as fallible and messed up as the family you were born into.

In Dinner with Friends, Gabe, Karen, Tom, and Beth are best friends. They are married, and each couple has children. They’re the kinds of friends who go on family vacations together. When Gabe and Karen find out that Tom and Beth are breaking up, they are forced to re-examine their own marriage, as well as their individual friendships with the other couple. Their first instinct is to ally themselves along gender lines, but they are soon forced into a more complex contemplation of how couples deal with the evolution of their marriages.

Although this subject matter lends itself well to simplistic, black-and-white writing, Margulies breaks the mold with his subtle insight and clever use of words. His extraordinary wordsmithing earned him a Pulitzer prize. He impressively represents a surprising number of viewpoints, and his characters evolve in a eerily familiar way.

As indicated by the title, the action of Dinner with Friends takes place around eating (much like the action of most adult friendships). Although the play begins with the trauma of one of the couples’ marriage breaking up, the difficult subject matter is made palatable by a clever sense of humor that this cast embraces wholeheartedly. This is not to suggest that the humor pokes fun at the seriousness of the situation, but the play simply does not ignore the silly interchanges of everyday life.

Director Janet Mitchko has given this wonderful script a smoothly orchestrated production and four actors who embrace the relationships of these characters with great energy. Their attention to precise delivery and physical reactions to one another evoke laughter and tears from an unsuspecting audience.

The set comprises the rooms of a house. On the walls are oversized paintings that depict the subjects of family photos: the wedding, one couple holding their baby, both pairs piled together on a couch, laughing. The paintings immediately evoke a sense of longing from the audience — longing for the childhood or the parenthood those family photos represent, or both. The paintings are reminiscent of those times of togetherness now imagined as simple and stress-free.

Gabe and Karen (played by Don Carter and Shelley Delaney, respectively) are the enviable married couple. They laugh and talk, they cook as a unit. They have it all together. They are the couple that makes all other married couples feel inadequate. However, their great affection for each other and their friends makes it impossible to hold it against them. Carter is a wonderful Gabe, with tender masculinity at the root of his character. He is loving and lovable, and is the conscience that struggles with his friend’s behavior. Delaney plays Karen with all of the energy and wit she deserves. Controlling and quick to judge the wrongs of her friends, Karen’s intense love and loyalty soften these characteristics into helpful and principled.

Tom and Beth (David Newer and Angela Roberts) are the couple that makes the rest of us feel good. They begin as a flake and a narcissist, introduced to each other by Gabe and Karen. Although they end up married, they never communicate enough to allow each other to evolve. Their inevitable individual evolutions are not experienced as partners, but as adversaries, and their resentment of each other runs deep. Newer plays Tom with all of the conviction of a man determined to change his life. His unwillingness to listen to his friends and his wife suggest that he is not looking for rationality, but for a sense of fulfillment. Anger and resentment are major components of Tom’s character, and the only good quality we get to see is a sense of humor. Although, it seemed too easy for him to be so disagreeable, seeing him vulnerable or questioning may have detracted from the single-mindedness of his quest for change. Roberts plays Beth as a little crazy, a little funny, and a little vindictive. In the end, Beth and Tom both want happiness; they just haven’t found it with each other.

Dinner with Friends allows the audience to peek in the window at the lives of two couples who are best friends, exploring the complexities of friendship and marriage, and the painful experience of choosing separate paths from those with whom your entire adult life had been bound.

Katherine Joyce can be reached at ingliskat@aol.com