This Seat's TAKEN by Barry Blake

DINNER CONVERSATION

     In DINNER WITH FRIENDS -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Donald Margulies comedy/drama that just opened at Redwood Curtain -- it is the set that strikes you swiftest and hardest. Upstage is a huge drape that suggests an Artist's Studio. A food magazine illustration in the style of a sidewalk chalk work of art covers the floor, Right down to the last fork, the set is furnished from the pages of "Crate and Sonoma: Pottery, Plow and Sundance Your Barrel and Hearth, Williams!" No Lillian Vernon around here. Know what I mean? The people who inhabit this world are 40-ish, cozy in the comfort provided by years of striving upwardly. They live in Connecticut, have a summer place out at Martha's Vineyard.
     Dinner conversations are about food: its meticulous preparation and sighing consumption; after all it is Dinner With Friends.
     This evening, Gabe and Karen, internationally known food writers, have invited their best friends Beth (aspiring artist) and Tom (attorney) to dinner to share with them tales of their recent tour in Italy. Tom is in D.C., unable to attend.
     Food seems as important as anything else in their lives. "You wouldn't believe how red those tomatoes were!" exclaims Gabe. Karen had problems with that pumpkin risotto. Inordinate speculation surrounds the magical polenta dessert. In Italy, they tell, the little lady with 76 years of cooking experience could perform miracles of transformation. Just give her a little corn, wine, garlic, a stick, and stand aside.
     The kids, Danny and Isaac, never seen but sometimes heard, interrupt to whine for help Crom another room. They are having trouble with the VCR while trying to watch Aristocats "for the 97th time." Demands are shouted back and forth. Is polenta more vital than parenting? Could be.
     There are some fine funny bits about that communal property known as husband and wife storytelling. Who starts the story? Who fiinishes it? Who gets it right?
     Through much of the first act the audience might suspect Dinner With Friends is merely a four-course satire of that milieu that values style over substance.
     Is it their banal conversation that's eating at Beth, who appears bored and distracted? This play is too smart for that. Rather, Beth knows something her best friends would never guess. Tom is leaving her and getting a divorce. Unable to hold back the sorrow, resentment and confusion, she drops the D-Bomb.
     After all it's Dinner With Friends. It's a comedy of manners about the evolution of friendship and marriage through the scarring and relentless weathering of time and change on those delicate institutions.
     What happens when DIVORCE suddenly invades an old and reliable friendship between two couples, a friendship so essential hat is has shaped into a kind of larger family with its own trusting dynamic? Husbands and wives begin looking at themselves, each other, and their relationships in new ways. Without preaching, judgement or untoward sentiment -- but with humor -- Margulies tugs and nudges his characters through the consequences of Beth's astounding news. This play, often autobiographical, knows well how to take the audience along with it.
     Ah, the audience. A "new playwright despite having already written about 30 plays, Margulies knows that theatre in this country is largely supported by a middle, upper-middle-class audience.
     One felt the Redwood Curtain audience identifies easily We are of an age, time and place that lived the boppity beat of Brubeck's "Take Five" we recognize that Picasso, we know that place setting, that sofa. It helps. But it isn't everything.
     The play's universal success (it has played virtually all over the world) surprised Margulies. "I mean it came as a total shock to me that audiences were as hungry as they were for this reflection of real life," he said in an interview with Michele Volansky. "I think the friendship angle is the reason it is embraced universally."
     Someone in the play says, "You never know what couples are like when they are alone." Maybe not, but we have a sneaky suspicion: they aren't talking about the same things we aren't talking about. That odd congruency is part of what makes a friendship. "Marriage goes through baseline wretchedness," says one character. This play talks about that. With humor.
     Director James Floss' sense of the play's rhythms and wakes is flawless. For the audience, chuckles of knowing laughter subside into moments distilled in absolute silence. His is a beautifully envisioned and cast production enhanced on every level by the convincing costumes for young and old (Kevin Sharkey), Jon Turney's sound design (music choices, barking dog, car), Christina Jioras' hair and make-up -- so important in the aging/de-aging of the characters over a 12-year period -- Francis Marsh's set deals well with diverse, changing scenes. The transition projections and music give you needed time to pull together what you just saw and heard and anticipate what might be coming next. The posters and playbill, reminiscent of Andy Warhol's work, evoke a time passed.
     Best of all, Bonnie Bareiiles gives a beautiful, exhausting performance that spans convincingly years in Karen's life and a seemingly endless horizon of human responses. Whether Karen is speaking from a curious brain or moving from an awakened heart, it feels like it is happening for the first time. Equally convincing is Terry Desch (Beth), who has very long scenes set in emotional extremes from opposite ends of the spectrum. Gabe's (Ron Halverson) steadiness, whether doubting, fearing or cajoling, is marvelous. I sensed that most of those in my row of the audience wanted to charge the stage en masse to strangle Tom then and there: something of a tribute to Larry K. Fried's acting skills.
     This is Redwood Curtain's best production of the year, one that will evoke conversations long after it ends its run. Dinner With Friends plays Thursdays through Saturdays until Nov. 23, curtain at 8. Call 443-7688 For reservstions.

NORTH COAST JOURNAL Thursday, Nov. 14, 2002