Theater Review—

The Difficulty Of Divorce, Even When It Isn’t Your Own

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Most of us have had the experience of seeing marriages dissolve. Apart from the impact the break-up has on the couple’s children, one of the most painful consequences of an ugly divorce is the way it affects longstanding friendships. We can’t help taking sides, extending sympathy to the one we perceive as being the injured party; old patterns of togetherness are disrupted, and the social lives of the newly single take our familiar pals in sophisticated new directions.

This is the subject of Donald Margulies’ thought-provoking Dinner With Friends, which finishes its production on June 19. One of the fixtures of our modern, emancipated, geographically and socially mobile existence is the importance of friends. For many Americans, friends are the new family — the people you trust, who make you feel connected and understood, in a way that mere relatives, far away, and different in their beliefs and values, do not.

The two couples in this play form just such a tight unit, ever since the newly-wedded Gabe and Karen fixed up Tom, his best friend from college with Beth, her good pal from work. For 12½ years the four of them socialized together, vacationed together, celebrated holidays and minded each other’s children. When Beth suddenly informs them that Tom has left her for another woman, and wants a divorce, Gabe and Karen are stunned. Can this marriage be saved? Should this marriage be saved?

Tom meets with Gabe and Beth with Karen. They each look great and claim to be happier than ever before. Life is so much easier without the responsibilities of marriage, without having anyone make demands on you or pass judgments. Beth has found a “playmate” in David, a former colleague of Tom’s who is teaching her to rollerblade. Tom and this new woman, Nancy, go running every morning and come home to make love in the shower before going to work. She buys his ties. The sex is fantastic!

The children? “Well, we stayed together for twelve years for their sake, but they’ll get over it! We can’t sacrifice our chance at happiness, just for them…”

In a flashback scene to the day they first met, at Gabe and Karen’s beach house, it is apparent that while sparks are certainly kindled between them, Beth is definitely a high maintenance girl, and Tom a budding narcissist.

Thirteen years later, Gabe and Beth, played by Steven Skybell and Jenna Stern, realize that it’s hard to know the truth of what goes on inside someone else’s marriage. Like many of us have learned, our friends can surprise and disappoint us with their choice to split and go in search of the pleasure dome. In the end, Gabe and Beth are left to face middle age, responsibility, and mortality alone. But at least they will face the aloneness together.

As played by David Aaron Baker, Tom is a pretty unsympathetic character, whining and lashing out, alternating bouts of self pity with abusive put-downs of his wife, while Mary Bacon as Beth is capable of unexpected hostility and bitterness, not only toward Tom, but to her friends as well. Yet the play is honest in avoiding simplistic schematics of the good couple-bad couple formula.

(For details on the remaining performances, visit WestportPlayhouse.org.)