'Dinner' Serves Moving Slice of Real Life

"Dinner With Friends"
PlayMakers Repertory Company

Above the newly squared, wood-covered Paul Green Theatre stage, a sparkling pine dinner table slowly descends on four taut cables.

Dressed with amber-tinted wine glasses, frosty green dishes and a stately French press pot, it is a gathering place of affluence, creativity and refined taste, fresh from the glossy pages of Ross-Simons and Williams-Sonoma. It also is where we first meet the central characters of Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Dinner With Friends."

The beautiful spectacle of the table as it carefully approaches the otherwise bare stage invites the audience into the domestic world of Gabe, Karen, Beth and Tom, two married couples enjoying their comfortable Connecticut existence. For the past 12 years, these four friends have shared dinners, recipes, advice and a house in Martha's Vineyard -- but the sudden dissolution of Beth and Tom's marriage throws everyone's relationship out of joint.

As the surviving couple, Gabe (Kenneth P. Strong) and Karen (Tandy Cronyn) struggle to understand their own problems in light of their best friends' divorce. In the midst of family, friendship and love, Beth (Jessica Peterson) and Tom (Ray Dooley) still admit to a bitter sense of loneliness -- a familiar feeling for Gabe and Karen.

Despite the first scene's mechanical feel, all four actors do a splendid job of capturing the emotional idiosyncrasies of their characters. Beneath the comically familiar bubble of daily life, the characters each struggle to understand their own need for companionship.

In the few moments when characters are left alone on stage, we sense that these individuals still are withholding something essential -- Strong's expression after a conversation with Dooley connects us with a private life his character previously managed to mask.

The characters are at the heart of this conversation-driven play, but the innovative set still manages to steal the scene every now and then. Rather than enumerate the tedious detail of domestic life, scene designer Narelle Sissons elegantly and attentively recreates a single element of the interior world -- a table, a bed, a counter -- and then frees up the rest of the stage for our imaginations. By avoiding the confinement of an overly literal set, Sissons allows us to travel geographically and chronologically with the characters without sacrificing any credibility.

By focusing on the "shock of mortality" that comes with marriage and children, "Dinner With Friends" explores a second coming-of-age in the human experience. Watching the practicalities of life consuming personal freedom isn't always pretty, but it also isn't necessarily bad.

This idea might seem counterintuitive, especially to a college-age audience, but the talented cast, engaging script and refined set of PlayMakers Repertory Company's production helps us understand how it might be true.

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.