Nothing but the Human Truth

During intermission at a preview of Donald Margulies’ “Dinner With Friends” shortly before it opened at the Variety Arts Theatre in Manhattan last November, the playwright witnessed a man walking out of his show. As he strolled up the aisle, the well-dressed theatergoer told his companions, “Man, this is too close to home, I’ll catch up with you later.”

Should the scene repeat itself when the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about marital discord and its impact on two couples opens Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, Margulies says that he won’t be entirely displeased.

“I really don’t want to send people flying at intermission,” says the 46-year-old playwright. “But when I overheard what this guy had to say--that this situation was so recognizable to him--then I figured I’d done my job well. I didn’t relish losing him, but I was impressed with his depth of reaction: not ‘I hate this,’ but ‘I can’t bear this.’ ”

Nonetheless, that guy is in the minority. Nearly a year after it opened, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan (who is repeating his duties at the Geffen), “Dinner With Friends” is still drawing capacity audiences at the Variety Arts. The 2000 Pulitzer for drama didn’t hurt. But the play--which premiered in Louisville in 1998 and ran at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa later that year--has also demonstrated an international appeal, with a nine-month run in Paris and successful productions in Japan, where it is still running.

To be sure, Margulies has never shied from taking a scalpel to the human condition and telling some ugly truths, as he has in such acclaimed works as his two breakthrough successes: “Sight Unseen,” the 1992 drama about a visual artist challenged to defend his ideals, and 1995’s “Collected Stories,” about betrayal and ambition in the literary world. But “Dinner With Friends,” even more than those plays, makes bitter observations about the impossibility of human relationships even more palatable than those other plays.

After all, the drama unfolds largely in the Connecticut home (and Martha’s Vineyard beach house) of Gabe and Karen, a pair of international food writers who, like their friends Tom and Beth, are encumbered with mortgages, children, carpools, two-car garages and a suburban, upper-middle-class marriage.

Heretofore, there have been few difficulties in the lives they’ve shared together since Gabe and Karen introduced Tom to Beth that haven’t been smoothed over with a sumptuous lemon almond polenta cake or grilled lamb and pumpkin risotto. But when the philandering Tom and Beth (played by Kevin Kilner and Dana Delany) suddenly decide to end their 12-year-marriage, the aftershocks are felt in the well-appointed kitchen--and bedroom--of Gabe and Karen (played by Daniel Stern and Rita Wilson).

Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, praised “Dinner With Friends” as “something you rarely find these days: a comedy about heterosexual relationships that is neither embarrassed by nor smug about its liberal upper-middle-class values. It is sober, wise and sometimes extremely funny.”

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Margulies’ biggest commercial success comes after a long tenure in the world of nonprofit off-Broadway and regional theaters that began when Joseph Papp produced his 1984 play, “Found a Peanut,” about children (played by adults) discovering a cache of money.

Further exploring the themes of dislocation and loss in such plays as “The Loman Family Picnic,” a satire of domestic dysfunction, and “The Model Apartment,” about the Holocaust, Margulies gained the reputation as an eclectic, thoughtful, even daring playwright.

In 1994, there was a disastrous excursion to Broadway when his “What’s Wrong With This Picture?,” starring Faith Prince as a Jewish mother who comes back from the grave, was clobbered by the critics. “It was a mistake that snowballed into a careening, out-of-control nightmare,” he now says of the experience that sent him into a clinical depression. “It still stings.”

Margulies has said that “Dinner With Friends” is his most “autobiographical work.” But unlike “The Loman Family Picnic,” which was a backward glance at his Brooklyn Jewish upbringing, and “Picture,” which was an attempt to come to terms with his mother’s sudden death a decade earlier, the playwright says that “Dinner” was inspired by his present life as a husband of 20 years, to Lynn Street, a geriatrician, and father to Daniel, his 8-year-old son. They live in New Haven, Conn., where Margulies moonlights as a professor at the Yale School of Drama.

“Being in my 40s, married with child, I began to take stock, to look at the relationships around us,” says Margulies, noting that the characters in his play are “composites” of people he’s known for a number of years.

“The marriages of our friends that we thought would be a constant were in upheaval; we were beginning to see them disappear from our lives. So, as I do with almost everything that I’m drawn to write about, I wanted to explore these problems in drama. But because it was a reflection of the way I live now, as opposed to thinking back on an event, I think it required a certain amount of girding of courage to push on through.”

In “Dinner,” Margulies trawls the domestic terrain covered by Edward Albee, Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller (one of his idols). And like them, the playwright writes about the sheer terror of the loneliness that can be experienced in marriage. Although Margulies acknowledges a debt to his predecessors, the playwright says he was not conscious of building on the works of these playwrights in the way that “Loman Family Picnic” was a deliberate extension of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

“One of the objectives was to make it a particular generation looking at this problem [of marriage and friendship],” he says. “A view of these relationships had not been done for a while, at least not in the heterosexual world.”

Margulies says that his parents--his father, Bob, was a wallpaper hanger, his mother, Charlene, a homemaker--had a complicated, not altogether successful marriage that relied more on traditional spousal roles to hold it together. “My being the product of the feminist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the nature of discourse becomes more psychological,” he says. “People are now more expressive, more introspective, more sharing of ideas than my parents might have attempted 30 or 40 years ago.”

As “Dinner” points out, couples can find the psychological intimacy of marriage either comforting or a source of utter despair, particularly as they arrive at the point in middle age when, as Margulies says, “a reckoning occurs”--when life becomes finite and the choices become narrower, when the complex tangle of expectations and self-delusions begins to fray at the edges. Each couple responds in its own way to the challenge.

Gabe and Karen, wrenched out of their complacency, appear to rediscover their love for one another in the minutiae of daily life. It is hilariously expressed in their nightly ritual of rolling back the covers of their bed together, which they do as if they were going for a gold medal in synchronized swimming. It is tenderly expressed in their pillow talk recapping the day’s events, particularly the unfolding saga of Beth and Tom as their friends go their separate ways.

“I see them as love scenes,” says Margulies. “They’re intimate, and we’re seeing in this fairly mundane way, men and women sharing ideas through conversation.”

The playwright says that there is often a collective and visceral audience response to these scenes, such as the one in which Gabe informs Karen of a particularly juicy piece of gossip about Beth given to him by Tom. She is simply aghast that he has failed to probe Tom for more information as she--and many women in the audience--would have. Margulies surmises that the audience responds to those scenes “because we don’t get to see them very often in our popular arts. We see people being glib with one another, bantering, but not this kind of intimacy.”

In “Dinner with Friends,” Margulies contrasts Gabe and Karen’s fastidious manner with Tom and Beth’s rowdy messiness. Even Tom and Beth’s break-up, much to their friends’ surprise, is hardly a clean one. Shortly after Beth decides to leave Tom, the two cap an incendiary argument with a rousing toss in the hay. Margulies says he understands how the chaos can be both threatening--and fascinating--to Gabe and Karen.

“There’s a tendency in some people to court chaos,” the playwright says. “That has never been my inclination from the earliest of years, though it’s of interest to me, how friends find aspects in one another that they don’t have and how they can take pleasure and satisfaction in those differences.”

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Though Margulies has no problem dissecting marriage in his work, he is clearly uncomfortable talking about his relationship with his wife. But he concedes that the post-mortems between Gabe and Karen are drawn to some extent from his personal life. “I don’t think I could’ve chosen someone other than Lynn, who’s very challenging and independent and involved in something that she’s quite passionate about,” he says. “We’ll have a discussion or argument, and I would tell her, ‘Can I use this?’ and she would give me permission. In that sense, she was quite a catalyst for many of the beats that occur in this play.”

While Gabe, the moral center of “Dinner,” presents a compelling argument for marriage as a bulwark of civilization, Tom is equally articulate in espousing what he calls “regaining unconsciousness,” getting back to a place that is not mired in the muck of too much talking and thinking. This he does with Nancy, a travel agent, who awakens his libido and his sense of adventure, an antidote to a lifetime of stagnation and complacency in a marriage that Margulies suggests should never have happened in the first place.

“There are some people who marry for the wrong reasons,” he says, “and who are able to get by for decades on just a notion, and that’s part of Tom’s awakening.”

Indeed, listening to Tom’s sex-sodden escapades and utter lack of recrimination, Gabe is envious and feels betrayed. “We were supposed to grow old and fat together, the four of us,” he tells Tom.

Likewise Karen, when Beth informs her that she has found a new man, is furious and jealous. “You need me to be a mess,” Beth tells her friend, signaling a new frankness between the two women that is bound to irrevocably change their relationship.

“The play is even more so about friendship than about marriage,” says Margulies. “One of the things I’ve experienced as the couples break up is that there are things that you just can’t talk to them about anymore, the framework is suddenly shattered, the common experience is gone. You realize how much your interaction depended on that, just getting through the daily routines, to define you and your friendship. It becomes verboten to talk about the other person or things that you may have done as a foursome.”

While Margulies agrees that there are “issues of morality” in his drama, he says “there are no judgments.” He says he became agitated recently when a theatergoer accused him of writing “a cynical play.” Indeed, Margulies says, there is skepticism in “Dinner With Friends”--after all, marriage is a struggle even in the most tender and open of relationships. But there is also hope. Karen and Gabe are talking more openly to each other, which Margulies sees--especially on Gabe’s part--as heroic.

“I’m not a philosopher or a psychologist, I’m an observer. I don’t know how to sum up things in neat and tidy ways,” he says. That morally ambiguous style may come in handy for his newest project: an adaptation of “A Man in Full,” the Tom Wolfe novel that is being made into an HBO miniseries. The cable network is also producing a small-screen version of “Dinner With Friends,” to be directed by Norman Jewison.

Meanwhile, Margulies says that he might even assay Broadway again (winning the Pulitzer has even caused some producers to reevaluate “What’s Wrong with this Picture?”). This time, he’ll make an attempt with an all-star mounting of “Sight Unseen” and perhaps with his most recent theatrical venture, an adaptation of Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” a 24-character, early 20th century epic about a brothel owner’s search for respectability and his teenage daughter, who runs off with a prostitute. A production of the play was recently presented at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre.

Despite his busy schedule, Margulies says he is not cutting down on one of his favorite rituals: having dinner with friends. “Who would have thought that food would take on such importance for our [once] bohemian generation?” he asks with bemusement. “Sharing good food and wine with one’s friends, it’s an art form.”

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* “Dinner With Friends” opens Wednesday. Regular times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Special matinee on Oct. 18 at 2 p.m. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave., Westwood. $21-$43. (310) 208-5454.