Food for love And when it goes bad BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Dinner with Friends By Donald Margulies. Directed by Michael Rafkin. Produced by Portland Stage Company, at the Portland Performing Arts Center, through May 15. Call (207) 774-0465.
	Backstage This Sunday, after picking up your week’s supply of bacon at the Fresh Approach, hop upstairs for a theatrical rendering of the southwestern, post-WWII provincialisms of Lookout, Texas. There, Olive Oyl and Popeye’s entanglements are big daily news, and your postmaster is also your druggist and your Greyhound ticket agent. The Maine Playwrights’ New Work Reading Series presents a staged reading of local actor/writer Denver Whisman’s play at the West End Yoga Studio, 155 Brackett Street, on May 15 at 7pm. Suggested donation is $5.

Food writer Gabe and his wife Karen (Richard Ward Duffy and Lisa Barnes) are foodies of all-around impeccable taste, and their marriage is just as savory and well-balanced as their dinner parties. For more than 12 years they’ve been feeding their best friends Tom and Beth (a lawyer and an artist, played by Jeffry Denman and Patricia Dalen) such delectables as lemon-grilled lamb and vanilla polenta cake, so when Beth breaks down over a glass of Shiraz with the news that Tom is leaving her for an airline stewardess, everything turns a little sour. The subsequent arguments, antics, and discussions — as all four discover what is relative and what is lasting in love, loyalty, and friendship — make up the scenes of Dinner with Friends, Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, directed by long-time Portland presence Michael Rafkin at Portland Stage Company.

As sensual as the realms of food and love are, their settings, in this production, are even greater visceral feasts, and the locales in which the friends negotiate their strife are realized on stage with the technical beauty and elegance for which PSC is renowned. Anita Stewart’s rotating set design, with its lusciously warm color palette and striking lines, is almost overripe in its gorgeousness. After the first scene — set in Gabe and Karen’s Connecticut kitchen, with a dining room set in bright red and yellow, a large painting of a lemon, and a red paper lantern — the lights dim, amber-colored streaks criss-cross the stage, smooth jazz plays, and the stage turns to reveal Tom and Beth’s bedroom.

When Karen and Beth have lunch on the patio, it is beneath high walls of orange and green, in the bright, squiggly smattering of lighting designer Bryon Winn’s sunlight. With its bold hues, sheer angles, and showy renderings of phenomena like sunsets, falling snow, and headlights in the driveway, set and lighting lend the play the feeling of an exceptionally urbane graphic novel.

The play’s characters are fully at home in these vivid rooms, bars, and patios, which is to say that the four of them often seem just as stylized as their settings. Beth’s revelation of her marital souring is accompanied by weeping so comic, so classically modern-woman-in-distress, as to feel like an archetype, or a send-up; and when Karen is forced into conversation with Tom in the aftermath, her hostility manifests itself in exaggerated jerky gestures and a voice pulled into upper registers.

Denman’s Tom is a stiff rail of a man in meticulous blue, and as a symptom of his monomaniacal midlife shift, he rarely deviates from one low-but-driven tone. As his best friend and foil, the often bemused Gabe, Duffy does a good job in slackening the pace and bringing the comedic relief of funny glances and pauses, as the quintessential big earthy guy. His marriage with Barnes’s Karen, a strong and articulate woman, radiantly acted, is a cliché of comfort and satiation — cuddling on a leather couch, he tells Beth in excited concert about the shared culinary magic of their trip to Rome.

These are all lively characters, and entertaining ones, and each one fills their role amply. But throughout their witty discussions of love, sex, and friendship, the roles they fill come across most immediately as energetic caricatures, characters that are usually a little too glib or a little too embellished to invite concern for their emotional lives. Margulies’s script gives everyone a chance to be a ham when it comes to love and sex, to often hilarious effect. But here the gravity of the play’s themes would seem to require us to care more deeply about its characters — a leap of empathy that is difficult when their story progresses like a bright and wry comic book for grown-ups.

But a flashback scene at the beginning of the second act (12 years earlier, when Gabe and Karen introduce Tom and Beth at their house in Martha’s Vineyard) goes quite a way in giving these characters more distinct flavors. It’s particularly refreshing to see who Tom once was. After his robotic mid-life determination, his younger and looser man, who laughs with an animal ease and stalks Beth around the stage with unflappable good humor, is a revelation. Seeing all four characters early in their relationships — how they move, talk, laugh — gives us a better sense of their love’s evolution than all their droll talk. Doting newlyweds Karen and Gabe prepare the dinner just as they will 12 years down the road. With the benefit of hindsight, it is a little heartbreaking to see that as they cook up bluefin for their friends they are feeding them more than just food.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com