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review Gabe and Karen invite their friends, Beth and Tom, over for dinner. Tom can't make it--he's on a business trip--and Beth is looking bored and distracted when we first meet her, as Gabe and Karen blithely chat up an Italian culinary vacation they've just taken. Suddenly, Beth breaks down and blurts out a flurry of confessions: Tom isn't on a business trip, he's with his mistress; Tom says he doesn't love her anymore; they're getting a divorce. That's when director Daniel Sullivan and playwright Donald Margulies turn up the heat: Gabe and Karen begin looking at their own marriage critically. Gabe becomes plagued with doubt about the relationship and shuts down, focusing his anger and frustration on Tom. When Karen looks to Gabe for solace, needs to hear his thoughts, he's unable to talk with her intimately. Even when their marriage looks like it might flounder. John Carroll Lynch delicately gives Gabe a rich inner life and does so as the character changes ever-so-slowly over the course of the evening. It's a full-bodied, complex performance approaching greatness. As Karen, Jane Kaczmarek never tips her hand she's acting; it's an absolutely believable performance, until the play's last weak minutes. T. Scott Cunningham (Tom) and Julie White (Beth) are both better in the flashback/flash-forward scenes of the second act than in the whole of the first, growing into their performances as the actorly tics-bombastic voices and forced emotion-fade away. It wasn't until the ending that I detected a false note: I didn't buy Gabe and Karen's kind-of-happy ending at play's close, and frankly, I can't tell if Margulies is to blame or if this is Sullivan's tweaking. Depending on the way that the final scene is played, it can either be sentimentally happy-negating all that has gone before it-or sadly tragic. Sullivan appears to be going for the former; a noticeable flaw in an otherwise insightful gem of an evening. |