Goodman Theatre
Tickets: (312) 443-3800
Through April 5
Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dinner with Friends has made the rounds. After a highly successful Off-Broadway run, multiple regional theatre stagings, and an HBO movie, Dinner with Friends has arrived in Chicago.
The Goodman Theatre scored the rights to this play, a play that is destined to become a classic – largely due to it’s finely drawn characters and emotionally raw dialogue. The thing that made the Off-Broadway production work as well as it did was the feeling of voyeurism the audience felt within the small Variety Arts theatre in New York. Placing Dinner with Friends on the Goodman’s Albert Stage is a great idea in theory, but in reality it takes you out of the play slightly.
Despite that, director Steve Scott, the Goodman’s Associate Producer, has staged the play well, and has cast it with some of the best actors in Chicago. Bravo, by the way, for the Goodman, for casting this play with local actors. I hope that keeps up. Dinner with Friends revolves around two couples – Gabe (Scott Jaeck) and Karen (Mary Beth Fisher), two writers whose entire lives revolve around food. Their best friends, Tom (James Krag), a lawyer, and Beth (Suellen Burton), an artist, are in the midst of some domestic troubles. When Beth announces to her friends that Tom has left her, it shakes not only the foundation of the friendship, but Karen and Gabe’s marriage as well.
Dinner with Friends is very tightly structured. There is only one scene in which all four characters appear, and that is a twelve-year flashback to the day that Tom and Beth met, introduced, incidentally, by newlyweds Karen and Gabe. The play’s other scenes are more intimate, allowing us to learn something new every scene. Margulies’ craft as a playwright is impeccable. Just when you think you know the story behind Tom and Beth’s breakup, you find out a new piece of information late in the play that changes things drastically.
The four actors all give solid performances, especially Scott Jaeck and Mary Beth Fisher, as Gabe and Karen.
If there’s a glaring weakness in this production, it’s Geoffrey M. Curley’s scenic design. It’s just too big. You want to think that the four characters live ordinary lives, but with the seeming palaces they live in, they have to work too hard to convince us they’re just like us.
This play is so well written it deserves a viewing. Sure, you can rent the movie, but it is so much better to experience this story with live actors in front of you.
