The characters of “Dinner With Friends” may have a privileged, Williams-Sonoma lifestyle, but their woes may be familiar, no matter your tax bracket.
Donald Margulies’ dramedy examines what happens to two couples in their early 40s after one of them breaks up. Don’t expect loud, brassy arguments, though: This isn’t “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but a low-key study of upper-middle-class growing pains.
The play — which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and is revived by the Roundabout — starts off in the cozy, tasteful Connecticut kitchen of Gabe (Jeremy Shamos, a Tony nominee for “Clybourne Park”) and Karen (Marin Hinkle). They’re going on and on about their recent trip to Italy to their friend Beth (Heather Burns, looking a tad too young for the part), and feed her grilled lamb, pumpkin risotto and polenta-almond cake.
Yep, they are the kind of people who dismiss a wine as “astringent” and own a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard. Played by lesser actors, they could be really annoying — the same problem afflicted Margulies’ 2010 Broadway outing, “Time Stands Still.”
Anyway, the hosts’ gushing stops only when Beth informs them that her husband, Tom (Darren Pettie), is leaving her for a younger woman.
Gabe and Karen take it hard: Turns out they pretty much created the other couple a dozen years earlier — Gabe introduced his college buddy Tom to Karen’s old publishing colleague Beth. As a disappointed Gabe puts it, the plan to “get old and fat together” is probably DOA.
Unlike their more impulsive, selfish friends, Karen and Gabe accept the routines and occasional boredom that are part of relationships.
“The key to civilization is fighting the impulse to chuck it all,” Gabe tells Tom. “Where would we be with everybody’s ids running rampant?”
As in “Time Stands Still,” the practical details tend to ring hollow. Margulies clearly isn’t interested in sociological analysis, and the characters’ backgrounds are fuzzy at best.
Luckily, he fares a lot better with the emotional content, which is carefully rendered in Pam MacKinnon’s nuanced production.
The best scenes involve Hinkle and Shamos, who are masters of the uncomfortable shuffle, the subtle tightening of the mouth, the sideways glance. They’re so good that you almost don’t realize just how good they are.