'Dinner With Friends': A Meaty Relationship Drama

What happens when a seemingly stable long-term marriage implodes? Dinner With Friends, Donald Margulies' 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning play which opened Thursday night at the Roundabout Theatre's Laura Pels Theatre, explores the pyrotechnic aftermath in the lives of two close couples and the unexpected questions that it raises. It all starts innocently enough over dinner in Gabe and Karen's well-kept kitchen. Over an impeccably planned dinner, the couple regale Beth (Heather Burns) with stories of their spectacular trip to Italy. Finally, when she can take the domestic bliss no more, Beth concedes that her husband Tom (Darren Pettite) has left her for a "flight attendant." Gabe (Jeremy Shamos) and Karen (Marin Hinkle) try to console her with the usual platitudes, but it's clear the foundations of their bourgeois bliss have been rocked.

Beth's version of events is immediately challenged in the following scene when Tom returns home and confronts Beth about having told Gabe and Karen about their split without him. He's furious that she's gotten the upper-hand by telling her story first – cleverly underlining how the play examines the way that multiple versions of theses relationship 'facts' can indeed exist in the eyes of very different beholders. We learn, for example, that the woman that Tom has run off with is not a stewardess, but a travel agent. "Did you tell them how you emotionally crushed me?" Tom rants. Comically, Tom and Karen end up yelling at each other on their bed which quickly turns to a passionate kiss.

Smartly directed by Pam MacKinnon, this production of Dinner With Friends showcases the talents of her actors – most notably Shamos's Gabe, who fully embodies the conflicted husband suddenly presented with a different life narrative from the one he'd always expected to follow. Pettite inhabits the self-absorbed narcissist so well that you almost forgive him for leaving his wife and kids. The though-provoking play combines with the top-notch cast to full effect, but it ultimately leaves more questions than answers. As Karen says in the final scene, "What does this say about our friendship? What did all those years mean?"