REVIEW: Dinner With Friends, Laura Pels Theatre ✭✭

Dinner With Friends Laura Pels Theatre

9 April 2014

2 Stars

Audiences underestimate the effect they have on the experience of theatre enjoyed, or otherwise, by their fellow theatregoers. A happy expectant audience can carry a show beyond the level of performance offered by the piece or players; conversely, an irritated, disinterested audience can diminish the heights a performance could potentially reach. A steadfast refusal to laugh or engage with the characters can be devastating: equally, uncritical unrestrained enthusiasm can choke the spark out of the finest performance, the greatest writing.

Today, the average age of the audience at the Roundabout's revival of Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize winning play, Dinner With Friends, in its final weeks at the Laura Pels Theatre was, perhaps, 87. They were a talkative, easily impressed lot, with a collective need to repeat phrases of dialogue. Loudly.

They also appeared not to have watched much television over the years, because their reactions of surprise at this depiction of two quite different failing marriages suggested an unfamiliarity with vinegary exchanges between spouses, comic barbs, awkward unrelenting pauses and clenched lip outrage: all the usual accoutrements of marriages in programmes as diverse as ER, Brothers and Sisters, Mad Men and Games of Thrones.

The result was that the performance of the play seemed better than it really was; because the audience found it involving and surprising.

There is no doubt that Marguilies' script is crisp and occasionally insightful and clever, but one doubts that it would garner a Pulitzer Prize today. It is not in the league of recent winners such as August Osage County and Next To Normal. Indeed, it seems obvious, trite and glib for the most part.

The narrative focus concerns two couples, friends, Gabe and Karen having introduced Beth to Tom. At a dinner where Tom is absent, Beth breaks down, admitting that Tom has left her. Gabe and Karen sympathise, but Karen tends to support Beth, believing her tale of Tom's infidelity. But then Tom, discovering Beth has broken the news, visits Gabe and Karen to tell his side of the story. But by then the relationship between the four has changed irretrievably and the rest of the play charts the unravelling of the truth in the breakdowns in both relationships.

Efficient is the best word for the acting and direction here. Pam Mackinnon, who helmed the remarkable Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf a season or two ago, directs. Perhaps because of the script, her treatment here is not as detailed, as meticulously thought through as in the Albee play.

Allen Moyer's set design, functional and incomplete, seems to reflect the approach to the play. There are some interesting things to look at but a deal of emptiness. He does clever things with windows and paintings and there is never any issue with understanding where any given scene is set. But it seems sterile and distant, much like the characters.

This may be one of those plays that really works when stupendous actors perform it. But where, as here, the cast are skilled actors but not more than that, it lacks engagement, and, critically, empathy. It is frankly impossible to care about any of these tetchy, cliche-ridden, hate-bubbling, smug sweat stains of truculent humanity.

Indeed, it is just as impossible to loathe these creatures.

Like flaky pastry, they dissolve without any substantial trace.

Heather Burns, Marin Hinkle, Darren Pettie and Jeremy Shamos are the quartet in question. Each barely sustained interest, but none of the "couples" or "besties" pairings were either believable or comprehensible. There was no sense that each married pair had spent a chunk of their lives together, no sense of the togetherness that comes from long relationships, whether good or bad.

The script does not help, in its endless pursuit of humour. The tracks of these characters, their impulses, desires and secrets, may be scattered throughout the pages, but the cast seem hard pressed to follow them or to join up the segments.

The result is that one has the feeling one has watched a marathon of a middle class soap opera on a cable network. Only the enthusiastic echo-chamber pensioners reminded that this was, actually, live theatre; a production of a Pulitzer Prize winning play no less.