American Stage producing artistic director Todd Olson has double duty with Dinner With Friends.
Not only is Olson directing, but he also is playing the part of Gabe in the play by Donald Margulies that opens this weekend at the St. Petersburg theater.
Gabe and his wife, Karen, are the happily married couple in the comedy-drama about midlife love and disillusion. Their best friends, Tom and Beth, are in the throes of a divorce.
Gabe and Karen, who have two children, are food writers. As the play begins, they have just returned from a culinary junket to Italy that they will chronicle for a glossy magazine. When Beth, who has arrived alone for dinner, says that Tom is leaving her, the teary outburst comes over a perfect lemon almond polenta in Gabe and Karen's perfectly appointed kitchen in suburban Connecticut.
Gabe and Karen (played by Julie Rowe) are stunned. They introduced Tom (Christopher Swan) and Beth (Colleen McDonnell) one summer on Martha's Vineyard.
"I think the play has to do with what happens when your support system blows up,'' Olson says. "These four people saw each other every weekend. Tom is Gabe's oldest friend. What happens when those roots are yanked from you?''
In seven deftly etched scenes, Dinner With Friends traces the breakup of Tom and Beth, who also have two children, in contrast to the contented relationship of Gabe and Karen. Tom and Beth hold some resentment toward their friends' storybook marriage.
"I think Tom and Beth look like people we all know,'' Olson says. "People that hit age 30, 31, 32 and married the person that seemed to be a good idea to marry at the time. They made a good run at it, and had kids, and there was happiness there, but you hit the wall of 40 or a little better, and you realize it's time to get off this train. I think we know Karen and Gabe, and we know Tom and Beth.''
Gabe and Karen fret that day-in, day-out domestic matters - "having kids, having to pay the mortgage, making the deadline, marinating the snapper,'' Gabe enumerates - dull love. It's these sorts of insights that have made the Pulitzer Prize-winning play a hit off Broadway and on the regional theater circuit.
