'Dinner With Friends' is a full
                               course with ... A bit of pain on
                               the side

New York's Donald Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize for  Drama in 2000 for "Dinner With  Friends," a four-person play  that details the deterioration of  a marriage and its effects on  everyone in the vicinity. 

 In this case, it's a marriage between two couples - and the audience is privy to every intimacy, argument,  confession and betrayal that sends these sad people  down a four-way street. 

 Or rather, a three-way street. One guy is out, the other three remain. And at the end of Margulies' yuppie  soaper - sometimes it plays like "thirtysomething" with  teeth - it's still a matter of question as to who  backstabbed whom, and so forth. 

 The Hippodrome State Theatre opens its 2001-2002 season with "Dinner With Friends" tonight. 

 The 45-year-old Margulies, previously a Pulitzer nominee for  "Sight Unseen" and "Collected  Stories," has said that the  ambiguities of the piece - the  burden of guilt, the moments of  half-truth - were put there  intentionally. 

 "I think it's really about the aftershocks that we all experience  when certain constraints in our  lives, things that we perceive to be  constant, suddenly shatter and are  no longer dependable," he explained. 

 "Dinner With Friends," which was recently produced as an HBO original movie, has also been a smash on the Paris stage. 

 "I think that many of my contemporaries are taking stock," Margulies said, "and I think that the play somehow speaks to that. It gives voice to certain issues that people are living with or grappling with, sometimes, that have not been articulated, and it gives voice to these issues. 

 "Watching the audience's reaction to the play has been very gratifying and interesting. It touches people, it upsets people, it discomforts people. Obviously there's humor in it as well, but I think that it also touches a nerve." 

 Going for the nerve on the Hippodrome stage are familiar faces Gregg Jones, Sara Morsey, Nell Page and Scott Kealey. The Hippodrome's Producing Director Mary Hausch directs.

 Gainesville Sun, Friday, September 7, 2001

 Hippodrome's dark 'Dinner' buoyed by fine performances

 By ARLINE GREER
 Sun Theater critic 

 What happens when two couples, best friends for more than a decade, face a divorce by one of the couples? How do friends who thought all was just fine in both marriages accommodate? Is the stable marriage threatened by the friends' break-up? 

 These questions are posed by Donald Margulies in his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Dinner with Friends," the Hippodrome State Theatre's season opener. The play asks more questions than it answers as Margulies, reluctant to make judgements, settles on an ambiguous feel-good ending. 

 On a spare set designed by J. Jeffery Guice, Karen and Gabe are serving dinner to their friend, Beth, Tom's wife. The four have been friends since college and early work days. Over the passage of time, they've entertained each other, vacationed together, raised their kids together and confided in each other. 

 And so, when Beth spills the news that Tom - who is not at the dinner - is leaving her, Gabe and Karen are shocked. Karen immediately sides with Beth. Gabe, not so sure, wants to hear Tom's side of the story. 

 As it turns out, Tom's story isn't complicated. Tom simply doesn't want to be married to Beth any more. When he is reminded that he has responsibilities to his kids, not to mention his wife, he is annoyed. He's found a new young woman who frees him to have fun, be spontaneous, be the person he was meant to be. 

 The play is constructed in a series of vignettes with scene changes deftly handled by the Hippodrome crew. Each vignette examines relationships altered by the dissolution of Beth's and Tom's marriage. 

 Under Mary Hausch's smooth direction, the Hippodrome's quartet for "Dinner with Friends" is right on point. Perhaps the best scene in the play takes place between Nell Page as Beth and Sara Morsey as Karen in which Beth, refusing to play the poor, bereft, abandoned wife, announces to a shocked Karen that she has a new love. Page and Morsey play off each other with consummate skill that lifts the play to a high moment of honest revelation. 

 Scott Kealey as Gabe and Gregg Jones as Tom have a complementary scene in which Jones' Tom revels in his new boy-toy status while Kealey's Gabe acknowledges the relinquishment of spontaneity as daily routine creeps into a ho-hum every-day life. 

 In "Dinner with Friends," Beth and Tom go their separate ways. Friendships change. Gabe and Karen are left uneasily examining their marriage. Where has the spontaneity of their youth gone? 

 In a poignant last scene, Karen demands an answer from Gabe. She gets one, a good one. But, almost immediately, the playwright sabotages it with a cutesy, sit-com ending. At that moment, it feels good - but like all of "Dinner with Friends," it leaves you hungry a short while later.

 Donald Margulies is an interesting playwright. There are very few writers in the world who can write characters as well as he can. Perhaps that's not his trick. His trick is taking people we can all identify with and putting them on the stage in situations we've all been in before. His most recent basis of reality, the witty, and often acerbic Dinner With Friends made a nice home Off-Broadway and Los Angeles--and now finds itself at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville. But this winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama feels appropriate mostly because it is so real and so like people we know. 
 
Producing director Mary Hausch has done a fine job of bringing this finely crafted drama to the Hipp's wonderful thrust stage. Making wonderful use of the space, we are instantly transformed into the lives of Karen and Gabe and Beth and Tom--two couples who have grown closer together and, in the case of Beth and Tom, APART together. Andy Fitch's wonderful scene design moves fluidly from one moment to the next, and the always prominent dining room table always sits in the right place. 
 
But this is an actor's showcase. All four roles are so well written that you need perfect actors in each role. Hausch has assembled a terrific group of Hippodrome regulars who inhabit each character as though they were playing themselves. 
 
As Karen and Gabe, Sara Morsey and Scott Kealey present an outstanding chemistry. They play off of one another extremely well, and their onstage marriage is believable and exciting. Each have individual shining moments, but their work together is most effective and heartfelt. 
 
Nell Page and Gregory Jones are equally outstanding in the showier roles of Beth and Tom. Page is a powerful presence and is matched by a strong counterpart in Jones--there confrontation scene in act one is among the most stunning moments ever performed, and only adds to this already impeccable production. 
 Hausch's direction was enhanced by the already mentioned scenic design of Andy Fitch, Marilyn Wall-Asse's costumes, and Robert P. Robins' well-balanced and thoughtful lighting design. 
 
Dinner With Friends is more than just an evening's entertainment--it is a thoughtful, charming, and thoroughly relevant look at marriage and divorce in a modern setting. As is said about any play or film--even the best writing can suffer in the hands of a bad director and cast. Luckily for Margulies, the Hippodrome has nothing but the best in all aspects of production. 
 
Don't miss the Hippodrome's astounding production of Dinner With Friends running through September 23, 2001. And, check out the HBO film version of the play, featuring Dennis Quaid, Andy MacDowell, Greg Kinnear, and Toni Collette (as, respectively, Gabe, Karen, Tom, and Beth).