Rating: 
Summary: Insight Well Seen
Review: Last season's foursome relationship play, Closer, by Patrick Marber, has many deserving admirers, but I'm partial to Dinner with Friends, and not just for the Pulitzer award, or because it's an American play, not British. What Margulies does so deftly is create individuals, couples, and friendships, all of which are distinct entities ... in a play that shows great insight into my generation's struggle with intimacy. Reading or watching the play I find myself hating the divorcing couple, yet unable to dismiss them. They are fully credible characters, acting out of clearly realized inner needs. I would recomment Donald Margulies' play to anyone who appreciates subtle realsim, peppered with subtle insight and humor.
Rating: 
Summary: Excruciating Dinner Party
Review: Margulies's play is interesting, but certainly not deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. The analyzation of characters is fairly sterotypical at times. In other instances, character portrayal is simply poor, as I find with Gabe. Gabe, at times, seems to border on being the "foppish" stock character of classical comedy; in the second act, however, he becomes more serious, seeming to deviate from his previous personality traits.Also, elements of the play are unrealistic. For instance: rage can be an aphrodisiac, but two people who are physically beating each other do not make such a quick transition to love-making as Margulies suggests. Also, Margulies's use of conversation is not believable. Characters are always interrupting each other, which is certainly true in real life. However, in this play they do it constantly, and nobody ever seems to notice. The characters do not become upset at each other, despite the fact that other characters continually interrupt them. An interesting play, certainly. But not nearly as good as one would believe, considering its awards.
Rating:
Summary: Riposte
Review: Reading an unfavorable online comment from "Plattypus", I came across this sentence -- "Also, Margulies's use of conversation is not believable. Characters are always interrupting each other, which is certainly true in real life. However, in this play they do it constantly, and nobody ever seems to notice." This is a statement that has to be challenged. People in conversation -- particularly heated conversation -- interrupt each other (and themselves) all of the time. I have done experiments transcribing tape-recorded conversations that bear this out. If you're gonna knock a work, do so with a valid argument.
Rating:
Summary: Affecting. Modernistic. Real. Sad. Annoying.
Review: The euphoric and blissful bubble that a functioning relationship can father is a wonderful thing. When two individuals are linked by common interests, shared ideals and beliefs, nothing in respects to a career, money or fame can come close to it; it is a wonderful, natural high to experience true love. However, what happens when a marriage does not work and the foundation that eventually led to that marriage was an erroneous one? In Dinner With Friends, playwright David Margulies explores just such a situation. We have two couples, Beth and Tom and Karen and Gabe, all somewhere in their forties and all the best of friends; the former couple, Tom in particular, has grown rather weary about his workaday existence as a lawyer. His energy for life has waned dramatically, and who does he pour his blame on? His artist wife Beth. She in turn blames him for not being open enough. Thus, the blame game starts to take root. The latter couple, Karen and Gabe, get woven into this battle due to their friendship, a friendship that slowly begins to crack when they try to comprehend the depth of their friend's unhappiness, i.e. the banal conversations, the duty of paying off a mortgage, the raising of kids, etc. It is essentially the story of four baby-boomers who do not like the turn their lives are taking. One couple breaks up, and in the process of doing so, they almost develope a 'plastic' or 'artificial' Ken and Barbie personality, that because I'm divorced now I jog more and have better sex. An arrogant happiness developes. That artificiality affects Karen and Gabe deeply, because they debate if their friendship was one of a genuine nature. The good times of the past are no more, so what is there to look forward to? Karen and Gabe are scared at the transition that their 'old' friends took, for if it happened to Tom and Beth, it could happen to anyone. And therein is where the power of this play lies: that divorce can happen to anyone. In its own right the play is smartly written: vibrant, sharp, stinging, fast-paced and edgy. A smart, wry drama about an unpleasant and common issue.
Rating:
Summary: A worthy winner
Review: There's always a backlash when a play wins the Pulitzer -- the usual chorus from the "Oh yeah?" crowd. I've been a part of that chorus on occasion. I do think there have been some mystifying winners and losers. (How SIX DEGREES lost to LOST IN YONKERS still has me scratching my head.) But this isn't a head-scratcher to me. DINNER WITH FRIENDS is not only well-observed in its surface details, there are volumes to explore in what's implicit. Plays usually begin with disrupting events as a way of questioning the usually unquestioned assumptions, and this DWT does with the precision of Updike. This is accomplished without easy moralizing, with an awareness of the darkness that sits just beyond the range of the living room lamp's pool of comforting light. One final thought: I'm getting tired of easy dissing of plays and other works because they are so-called "boomer" chronicles. To assume that -- because a play deals with characters from a certain historical/socio-economic background -- it isn't to be taken seriously is as bigoted as dismissing a work because it deals with black or gay or Lithuanian concerns. People don't lose their claims to be respected as human beings just because you envy them.
Rating:
Summary: A worthy winner
Review: There's always a backlash when a play wins the Pulitzer -- the usual chorus from the "Oh yeah?" crowd. I've been a part of that chorus on occasion. I do think there have been some mystifying winners and losers. (How SIX DEGREES lost to LOST IN YONKERS still has me scratching my head.) But this isn't a head-scratcher to me. DINNER WITH FRIENDS is not only well-observed in its surface details, there are volumes to explore in what's implicit. Plays usually begin with disrupting events as a way of questioning the usually unquestioned assumptions, and this DWT does with the precision of Updike. This is accomplished without easy moralizing, with an awareness of the darkness that sits just beyond the range of the living room lamp's pool of comforting light. One final thought: I'm getting tired of easy dissing of plays and other works because they are so-called "boomer" chronicles. To assume that -- because a play deals with characters from a certain historical/socio-economic background -- it isn't to be taken seriously is as bigoted as dismissing a work because it deals with black or gay or Lithuanian concerns. People don't lose their claims to be respected as human beings just because you envy them.
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.
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