Dinner with Friends

Rating:
Summary: Realistic Play About Relationships
Review: This is by far one of the most engaging plays that I have read recently. Margulies creates realistic characters, who, in middle-age, find themselves questioning everything in their lives they thought was real. Anyone who has been married for any length of time can certainly relate to some of the thematic questions of this play. What is the meaning of commitment? Can marriages endure a lifetime? How are long term friendships effected when a marriage fails? Dinner with Friends is a deceptively simple, yet deeply moving play.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes
Review: This play, mysteriously awarded prizes, must be the most conventional, boring work of the last decade. As at least one reviewer argues, there's nothing fresh here, nothing that transcends the hip soap-operatic. Margulies is the John Grisham or Robert Ludlum of playwrights. He should be writing TV dramas where the absence of philosophical subtext or depth is taken for granted. Only sentimentalists who swoon over problems in "relationships" could take this pabulem seriously. Apparently these days, this includes the Pulitzer Committee. It's good to remember, though, that this Committee, at least in drama awards, is overly fond of the safe and conventional. It prefers toothless works to anything with real bite. It rewards an empty work like "Three Tall Women" but scorns the unnerving "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" No doubt it will continue to reward the forthcoming effusions of the tame Donald Margulies.