Dinner With Friends
Opening Night: February 13, 2014
Closing: April 13, 2014
Theater: Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
Dinner With Friends follows Karen and Gabe, who played matchmaker with their friends Beth and Tom. Ever since, the two couples have been inseparable—going to the Vineyard every summer, raising their kids and enjoying countless dinners together. But when one marriage unexpectedly crumbles, the couples’ lives begin to veer in opposite directions. Can these four friends move on to the next chapter without moving apart or have they changed beyond recognition?
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
February 13, 2014
Marriage and friendship, specifically the end cuts of each, are the main courses of Dinner With Friends. It’s back Off-Broadway in a revival that is perfectly well done, but which still can’t mask the work’s skimpiness. Seriously, where’s the beef? That goes double considering that this sincere but unsurprising play by Donald Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2000. The show was made into an HBO film a year later.
READ THE REVIEW
February 13, 2014
The mid-life crisis doesn’t hit everyone the same way: While some folks take up piano lessons, others opt for divorce. Donald Margulies examines both routes in Dinner With Friends, now being revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre under the direction of Pam MacKinnon. This Pulitzer Prize winner from 14 years ago receives an updated production, but the underlying themes are ones that millions of unhappily wed couples will find painfully familiar.
READ THE REVIEW
February 13, 2014
Too many contemporary plays, though chewy at the start, are stale by the end. Aggressively interesting premises use up all their dramaturgical energy, leaving nothing to grow on as the minutes tick by. And time is not good to them in the larger sense, either. After fading in the second hour, they then fade completely in the following year. A decade on, they are empty shells with interchangeable titles. But despite its generic moniker, that has not been the case with Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2000 and a quiet stunner once again in the Roundabout’s radiant revival at the Laura Pels. It grows as it goes, and seems more substantial now than ever. Hard to say whether that’s because it has ripened like the tomatoes and wines it so obsessively considers — “What do you think of the Shiraz?” — or because time has ripened audiences into a deeper consideration of its sweet-and-sour midlife themes. Probably both. At any rate, it’s delicious.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 14, 2014
When a long-married couple gets divorced, their entire inner circle suffers a ripple effect; even their friends can go through painful adjustments. Donald Margulies’ 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Dinner With Friends chronicles consequences that test loyalties among longtime friends and within marriages when one of a close pair of couples erupts in a bitter breakup.
READ THE REVIEW
February 14, 2014
Does time erode everything it touches? This painful question lies at the heart of Dinner With Friends, Donald Margulies’s delicate-hued, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about two married couples who come to a crossroads in their long friendship when one pair breaks up. In the Roundabout Theater Company’s new production, the first major New York revival since the play was seen Off Broadway in 1999, acceptance that the passing years often bring unwanted change, loss and diminishment settles most deeply in the heart of Gabe, one half of the unsplit couple. Portrayed by Jeremy Shamos (Clybourne Park) with an affecting sense of churning confusion, Gabe is stunned into silence when he hears that his best friend Tom (Darren Pettie) is leaving his wife, Beth (Heather Burns), after 12 years of seeming contentment.
READ THE REVIEW