Director Jewison Feasts His Eyes on ‘Dinner With Friends’

“Why did ‘Dinner With Friends’ win the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year?” asks director Norman Jewison--a rhetorical question he quickly answers: “It must be saying something about marriage and friendship in America today that people recognize and respond to.”

Like everyone connected with the HBO production “Dinner With Friends,” which premieres tonight at 9, Jewison insists it was the quality of the material that drew him to the project--and back to his roots on the small screen.

The adaptation of Donald Margulies’ play, which opened in 1998 and had one of its first stagings at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, tells a deceptively simple tale of two married couples, a seemingly inseparable foursome of lifelong friends, who face a collective crisis when one of the marriages unexpectedly folds.

“I am a storyteller,” Jewison says. “That’s what I do for a living. The first question I ask when I’m offered something is, ‘What is it about?’ It has to have something worthwhile to say about our society, about us as people, about our joys and sorrows.”

The three-time Oscar nominee as best director (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Moonstruck”) has adapted many theater pieces, exhibiting a fondness for works such as “Agnes of God” and “A Soldier’s Story” that combine a strong message with a well-crafted suspense narrative. “Dinner With Friends,” too, pursues a serious purpose without sacrificing entertainment value, lacing a dramatic story of divorce and middle-aged disappointment with flashes of comedy and satire.

“It sort of captured something,” says producer Laura Ziskin, who responded strongly to the play and brought it to HBO and Jewison. “It’s about a reassessment that goes on in midlife for the baby boomers, an idealistic generation that maybe spurned marriage initially. With great humor and great insight it seemed to capture that moment when you say, ‘Is it worth it, should I stay?”’

Filmed last year in 29 days, at the Culver Studios and on location in Malibu (standing in for Martha’s Vineyard), Jewison’s “Dinner” is a very close adaptation of the play. “We didn’t want to change a word,” says actor Dennis Quaid, “because it’s just so well-written.”

Although set in a very American milieu among upper-middle-class East Coast yuppies, the play has traveled exceedingly well. “It’s universal in its appeal,” says Quaid. “The play has been performed in Tokyo and in Paris, and it’s spoken to people everywhere.”

Jewison’s enthusiasm for the material was evident late last year, as he directed the story’s explosive opening sequence on a detailed, fully stocked foodie kitchen set, complete with Viking stove and gleaming copper cookware. Jewison seemed completely engrossed in the performances of Quaid and Andie MacDowell as long-married journalists Gabe and Karen, and Toni Collette as their friend Beth, who at the climax of this scene breaks down crying and drops the big one: Her husband Tom is leaving her for another woman.

Grinning from ear to ear behind the video monitor, Jewison could be seen silently mouthing all the dialogue along with the performers, at times even swaying from side to side to the actors’ rhythms.

“It is just a wonderful feeling,” says Greg Kinnear, who as Tom was only a looming off-screen presence in this scene. “You have no idea how inspiring it is to have a director who connects so deeply with the material. He’s challenged by it, he’s pursuing it with passion. I think a guy like Norman will only conduct a symphony when he really hears the music.”

This opening sequence--which combines witty repartee with real-time food preparation activity and then turns on a dime into something wrenchingly emotional--exemplifies Margulies’ mastery of presto change-o narrative mechanics. Before the session was over, Collette had to enact her breakdown eight times because the sequence was being filmed in one long take and Jewison wanted to make sure that all the elements meshed.

One secret of the play’s success with audiences, despite its hard-nosed observations about selfishness, betrayal and divorce, is Margulies’ obvious delight in springing small surprises on the audience. He wants viewers to sympathize with all his characters, but he doesn’t make it easy.

“It’s sort of like you’re watching a court case,” MacDowell says. “You hear one side of the breakup story in this scene, and you truly believe it. You’re ready to crucify Tom, who is having an affair and has betrayed his wife. But then in the next scene you hear his side of it and you go, ‘Now wait a minute.”’

Of the four actors, it is Kinnear who is skating on the thinnest ice with the audience.

“I’ve equated it with coming in as a quarterback when your side is down 21 to zero,” Kinnear says. “Tom has so many horrible black marks painted against him in that first scene that by the time he appears, you expect him to have hooves and a pointy tail. That was what appealed to me most of all. I felt that Donald had given me the words and the intuitions I needed to try to dig Tom out of this hole.”

For all its humor, “Dinner With Friends” is a serious play, and it arrives at a sense of guarded optimism about the future of marriage. It looks at marriage not as an arena for self-fulfillment but as one focal point in a much broader landscape of relationships.

When a marriage fails, Margulies suggests, it isn’t always or only the spouses themselves who should be held responsible.

“Ultimately, I guess it is pro-marriage play,” Kinnear allows. “If you’re divorced, it asks you to reconsider your situation. But I would also argue that if you’re happily married, it asks you to reconsider that situation as well. I don’t think it lets either side off the hook. In the end, I think that’s the power of the piece: It inspires a little bit of fear about things that we don’t like to be fearful about it. And it says that fear is good for us.”