About the Play:

Dinner with Friends has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, Female/Male Scenes and three and four-person scenes.

Dinner with Friends is a full-length comedic drama by Donald Margulies. Karen and Gabe, Beth and Tom. The two couples were once inseparable, the closest of friends who knew all the intimate details of each other's lives. Or so they thought. When Beth drops a bombshell on Karen and Gabe, everyone begins to evaluate their own lives and the paths they have chosen. A modern day masterpiece on the destruction of today's marriage, Dinner with Friends is filled with humour, warmth, insight and wisdom.

Dinner with Friends tells the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce. Gabe and Karen, a happily married couple, have been friends with married couple Tom and Beth for many years. While having dinner at Gabe and Karen's home one night, Beth tearfully reveals that she is getting a divorce from Tom, who has been unfaithful. Through Donald Margulies's flawless use of language and his ability to convey the truest of dialogue and characterization, we watch, as the two couples do, their closest friends going through a wrenching breakup. Not only does he create vivid detail of a marriage in decline, he also brilliantly depicts the couple's closest friends, and how this new mirror to their own marriage sends them through a whirlwind of raw emotion and self-reflection. Dinner with Friends is a rich drama touched with humour and is a true masterpiece, reflecting on marriage, friendship and the choices we all must make.

Dinner with Friends, which originated at the famed Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the annual Festival of New American Plays in 1998, went on after its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California to win numerous awards, including the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and long runs Off-Broadway and in Paris. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has enjoyed productions all over the United States and around the world.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…Margulies writes about relationships with such intelligence and spiky humor that his comedy-drama … becomes something quite wonderful." — Time Magazine

"A play for our time … wry and keenly observed and bathed in the unspoken sorrow that can sneak up on you in middle age…." — New York Times

"This is a smart and subtle play that understands there are no easy answers as people evolve and relationships settle into routine … full of life, warmth, laughs and wisdom…." — New York Daily News

"Donald Margulies has drawn one of the most complex and convincing portraits of a marriage in recent memory." — The Wall Street Journal

"Dinner with Friends is entertainment as succulent as it is sobering." — New York Magazine

"A breezy comedy of modern manners that turns poignant and deeply affecting by its end. Margulies touches chords that resonate with a deep affecting humanity." — San Francisco Examiner

About the Playwright:

Donald Margulies is an American playwright, screenwriter, and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play, Dinner With Friends. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalists Sight Unseen and Collected Stories. He has also developed screenplays for HBO, NBC, Paramount, Propaganda, Touchstone, Warner Bros., TriStar and Universal.