Dinner with Friends

Reviewed by Taylor Kass
Crimson Square Theatre Company
Closed

Dinner with Friends begins with ingredients essential for any successful dinner party — delicious food, good friends, and an earth-shattering revelation of infidelity.

Middle-aged married couple Gabe (Jay Huguley) and Karen (Samantha Sloyan) are best friends with fellow married couple Tom (Chris Devlin) and Beth (Tania Gonzalez); they’ve shared twelve years of vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, playdates between their children, and gourmet home-cooked dinners. When Beth and Tom announce they’re splitting up, the four are forced to re-examine their once comfortable relationships.

There’s no denying that this cast is stellar. Jay Huguley makes for a genuine and perceptive Gabe (although the character struggles to communicate even his most basic thoughts and feelings to his wife). Gabe’s wife Karen (Samantha Sloyan) is a high-strung, strongly principled perfectionist; Sloyan plays up her tightly-wound primness for some sneakily hilarious moments while also bringing much-needed warmth to the character. Her best friend Beth (Tania Gonzalez) is her polar opposite: a free-spirited artist who wears her heart on her sleeve. While Gonzalez’s performance occasionally edges into over-the-top territory, she depicts Beth’s vulnerable moments well. Chris Devlin provides as much truth and sincerity as possible to Beth’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Tom, but this character is so fundamentally unlikeable that it is difficult to care about the demise of both his marriage and his friendships. Watching him manipulate, guilt, and belittle his wife and friends is deeply unsettling and erases any interesting ambiguity from the play. Are we to legitimately entertain his argument that men only want to be understood and their irresponsible behavior is the fault of their frigid and hyper-critical wives who drive them to cheat?

Dinner with Friends won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, but its musings on friendship and marriage now seem tired and unimaginative. It is exhausting to extend sympathy to men who have no sympathy for anyone but themselves. It is equally exhausting to watch the women in this play painstakingly untangle and examine their thoughts and feelings while the men barely self-reflect at all. It is also exhausting to see vibrant and intelligent actresses like Gonzalez and Sloyan struggle to add depth to such one-dimensional female roles.

This is a drama presumably about four people who gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationships, yet none of the characters seem to have learned anything by the end. There are brief glimmers of potential emotional breakthroughs in the second act, but, frustratingly, the characters only patch over their problems with new lovers, fancy trips and meaningless conversation. Dishearteningly, the only takeaway from Dinner with Friends is that marriage is a fundamentally flawed social institution, doomed to end in a fiery explosion of toxicity and resentment or, alternatively, lovelessly putter along on autopilot for eternity.

Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills; Closed. www.CrimsonSquare.org. Running time: approximately two hours and 10 minutes with a 15-minute intermission.