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Theatre & Box Office |
Reprinted with permission of The Times of Northwest Indiana. 'Dinner with Friends' goes deep inside mysteries of marriage and friendship THEATER SCENE with Kevin Murphy The couples -- Karen (Karla VanWinkle) and Gabe (Jay Williams), Beth (Patricia Bird) and Tom (Dan Matern) -- have been friends for most of their married lives, even to the point of spending vacation time together. Their children, whom they have reared in reasonably close proximity, also are best friends. The play opens with Beth and her two kids visiting Karen and Gabe, who have just returned from a tour of Italy, gathering material -- especially recipes -- for their work, which is writing about food. Tom -- an attorney -- was also expected, but Beth tells them he had to fly to Washington on business. Before the evening ends, she tells them quite a bit more, and life becomes unexpectedly unsettling for all four of the friends, as the core of their collective relationship is severely cracked. Bird's Beth is an especially multi-faceted -- and somewhat hard to stereotype -- character, which is consistent with the many ways in which her life is undergoing change. Like a virtuoso jazz artist, Bird takes us through Beth's phases without making her easy to categorize. And like a jazz work, Beth's life is able to surprise even her best friends. While Tom is the original source of big surprises, both the text and Matern show him to be far less complex than circumstances -- and Beth -- first suggest. In fact, it is his lack of complexity that is at the core of their difficulty. Matern's characterization makes Tom's cork-floating-with-the-current approach to life believable. Circumstances make Karen the emotional porcupine of the group, and VanWinkle makes her agitation painfully apparent, as she strives to jam all the crumbling pieces of her -- imagined -- well-ordered life back into their proper places. Of the four characters, Gabe seems to be the most well-anchored, although his initial resistance to traumatic change seems superficially flippant. Williams takes us through those transitions of Gabe's nicely. We feel his struggle for understanding, for translating into his own life and relationship with Karen, for adjusting as well as possible to the changes triggered by Beth and Tom. CTG's "Dinner with Friends" is not a rerun of 1950's-era family sitcoms. There are funny lines and funny moments, but this is a look at one variation of more modern "couplings" that sometimes evolve into marriage. It raises questions, too, about how people sometimes become paired, whether or not friends should even try to bring friends together in a dating mode, and whether living together before marriage is any more a guarantee of success than was the more traditional way of becoming a cohabiting couple. It also raises questions, as much by omission as by expression, of how such advantaged people can be so narrowly focused in their lives that only their immediate appetites seem to have much significance for them. But that question will have to be answered by some other work. If the script does not answer all those questions, the actors make the discussion that does take place worth experiencing, and the set, designed by Jim Wedzina, a visually interesting place in which to have it. "Dinner with Friends" runs through May 22, with performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 Sunday, at the Chicago Street Theatre, 154 W. Chicago St., Valparaiso. Tickets: $12 ($10 for seniors, $8 for students). Reservations: (219) 464-1636. |