The main action of Dinner With Friends occurs before the play begins: Tom has left Beth. The first thing we see is Karen and Gabe excitedly describing their trip to Italy to a distracted Beth, who hasn't yet told her best friends.
The play's strength is its honest, realistic characterization and - aside from a thuddingly contrived dream near the end - believable and even hilarious dialogue. Here, it's brought to life by a strong cast in which Plambeck directs as well as acts.
The more judgmental Karen becomes, the most accommodating Gabe gets - or is she reacting to him? What's amazing about Verdon and Plambeck in these roles in that nothing seems amazing. Their interaction has the natural fit of a pair of old shoes, especially in the opening and closing scenes, which convey the impression of a long, pleasant and relatively frictionless life together.
In contrast, "naturalness" is not a word that applies to the relationship between Alysabeth Clements and Mark Hennessy as Beth and Tom. She's prickly and evasive; he's self-righteous, self-absorbed and any number of other hyphenated terms beginning with "self." Their relationship - what we see of it, in a brilliantly realized fight scene - suggest nothing so much as cobra and mongoose.
Even the end of a marriage that was probably a mistake in the first place, though, has enormous consequences on the various friendships. "It's like a death, isn't it?" Gabe asks.
Margulies takes what easily could be a collection of clichés voiced by a group of stereotypes and creates something fresh, compelling and believable. Instead of creating complex characters, he creates relatively simple characters and allows complexity to flow naturally from their relationships.
Be forewarned: The play's accuracy and insight into human relationships make it one of the worst date plays ever written.
To those what haven't experienced marriage, even Gabe and Karen will seem like delusional, rationalizing compromisers, their marriage a duet to the tune of "Is That All There Is?"
Those of us who know better - or are at least determined not to admit our rationalizations and delusions, even to ourselves - will see our friends, and ourselves, affectionately recreated on stage.
Meanwhile, at the end of another strong season, the Star Bar Players remain the Colorado Springs' theater scene's answer to Rodney Dangerfield.
No respect at all.
Opening night was marred by a fashion show rehearsal in the nearby auditorium (although the extraneous noise actually went well with Tom and Gabe's bar scene). One of last week's performances had to be rescheduled because of a Battle of the Mariachi bands.
Unfortunately, such events are the norm for this excellent community theater group.
-- Mark Arnest
Play with your food
Dinner with Friends a top-quality theater experience
The Colorado Springs Independent
For those of you in the habit of bemoaning the lack of East Coast, quality urban experiences, like fine dining and professional theater all within walking distance of your digs, burrow out of your holes and partake in the Dinner with Friends meal-and-a-show deal between the Star Bar Players and Sencha bistro. For 30 bucks, you can have a delicious prix fixe meal at Sencha with a salad, choice of three entrees and dessert, followed by a professional-class performance of "Dinner with Friends" just five blocks away at the Lon Chaney Theater.
Once again, The Star Bar Players have delivered. At the center of the four-person play are Karen and Gabe (Crystal Verdon and David Plambeck), a long-married couple with a couple of kids. They have a solid marriage, anchored by a mutual love of food and a captivation with the minutia of quotidian daily life. Their best friends are Beth and Tom (Alysabeth Clements and Mark Hennessy), who they introduced years before. In the first scene of the play, however, Beth divulges that Tom is leaving her for another woman, and the cozy world of the two couples is shattered.
Director Plambeck clearly understands that in such a domestic drama, less is more. With the exception of Tom's character, none of the actors move over the top as they unfold the traumas that are unreeling their middle-class, middle-aged lives. Thus, the way that a character eats his foods, twirls a glass of wine, or passes a hand across a brow becomes the most important action on the set and is, in its subtlety, riveting.
It is Plambeck himself, as actor, who is the most accomplished at this quiet desperation. His character appears completely transparent as if a middle-aged food critic from Connecticut had suddenly beamed down into Lon Chaney Theater and begun to live his life. Hennessy provides a nice contrast to Plambeck's almost phlegmatic persona, an effective vehicle for the character's middle-aged narcissism. The two women also play off of each other nicely, especially in the scene where they sit and discuss the history of their friendship, and the striking paleness of Clements and her newfound sexiness shine in contrast to the golden frumpiness of Verdon.
The real strength of this play, however, is the script. Playwright Donald Margulies won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, and no wonder. Whether your marriage is more comfortable and dull like Gabe and Karen's (and ripe for wonder of what might exist on the other side), or more tormented and confused like Beth and Tom's (and ripe for questioning whether life and children were a grand mistake), it is hard not to recognize oneself in the daily complaints, small triumphs or ugly scenes that Margulies has scripted. His sympathy for and skewering of marriage is precise and unflinching, and throughout the opening night's production you could see one audience member after another squirming in recognition.
It would be ideal to take advantage of this Sencha/Star Bars production with another couple. A nice dinner for four on the Sencha patio, a fine play, and a good excuse to go out for another bottle of wine to contemplate the meaning of friendship, of marriage, and of the daily rewards and challenges of growing older. Together and apart.
-- Andrea Lucard
