Processed cheese

>> Audience eats up Dinner With Friends

by AMY BARRATT

Two couples have been friends forever. One couple breaks up. Everyone is traumatized.
I think it’s safe to say that Donald Margulies didn’t invent this plot-line when he wrote Dinner With Friends. Watching this play at Centaur theatre, I was reminded of everything from Pinter’s Betrayal, to the Sondheim Musical Company, to that TV show Once and Again, to every second chick flick ever made.
Broadway darling Margulies knows what the upper-middle class, straight white folks who go to Broadway plays want to see on stage: themselves, aggrandized. He can put together a tight package of a play better than almost anybody writing today, but his subject matter remains banal. Like Neil Simon with fewer laughs.

Still, director Rosemary Dunsmore has put together a nice production of the play, complete with a Beatles soundtrack that seemed to pull all the right strings in the straight people sitting around me. Couples snogged at intermission and left holding hands at the end as if they’d been through something very profound together.

In Dinner With Friends, Gabe (Gordon McCall) and Karen (Linda Smith) play a food-writing team who are also a married couple with kids. Their best friends are Tom (Steve Adams), a lawyer, and Beth (Danette MacKay), an artist. Food snob Gabe cracks wise about all the processed food consumed by his friends, but if this play were food, it would be closer to a TV dinner than a gourmet spread.

McCall, although a little old for the part, is endearing as family man Gabe. Smith and MacKay are fabulous, neither underplaying nor overplaying their roles and effortlessly getting laughs. The weak link is Adams’ character. A lot of what the unfaithful husband says is supposed to sound like “bad greeting cards” and does, but at a certain point, we really should feel for him. I didn’t. Adams’ portrayal veers too close to used-car salesman.

The production runs smoothly, with no blackouts, and cast members often changing the décor themselves. The two men have a whole choreography at one point that’s a real crowd-pleaser. The design elements (set and costumes by Dennis Horn, lighting by Spike Lyne) support the story without getting in its way. The offstage children, despite the inevitable buzz that precedes the delivery of their recorded lines, are very natural.

Imaginary orphans

Opening tomorrow (April 12) is Concordia Theatre’s final show of the season, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. It can be expected to be a more traditional reading of the piece than the one at Quat’Sous earlier this season which set the play during a Quebec civil war. On the other hand, there’s talk of “unconventional design concepts” that “reinforce the conflict between illusion and reality,” in this play about six characters created and then abandoned by their author before their story could be written. Winner of a 1934 Nobel Prize, the play is still gripping and its themes astonishingly current. :

Dinner With Friends, to May 12 at Centaur, $20–36. Box office 288-3161
Six Characters in Search of an Author, April 12–14, 18–21, at D.B. Clarke Theatre. $5–10, 848-4742