"Dinner With Friends" by Donald Margulies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, was performed this week by the Brandeis Players in the inaugural show in the new Carl J. Shapiro Theater. In this play, Donald Margulies gives us a bitter taste of divorce, with a spoonful of lemon-almond-polenta cake to make the medicine go down. During Family Weekend, in the presence of a tri-generational audience composed of famlies and friends, the performers did a tactful job of portraying the inevitable downward evolution of interpersonal relationships. The plot is relatively simple. Happily married Gabe (Jeremy Goren, '03) and Karen (Emily Evans, '04) invite Gabe's law school buddy, Tom (Solomon Sheena, '03) and Karen's artist friend, Beth (Elisa Harkness, '05) over for dinner to spark a romance between the two single friends. Beth and Tom decide to put an end to their lives alone and follow their friends' footsteps down the rocky road of marriage.

Twelve years and many dinners later, Beth announces to Gabe and Karen that Tom is leaving her for a stewardess/travel agent with whom he has been having an affair. Gabe and Karen find themselves choosing opposite sides on the matter, which upsets their perfect harmony and sheds light on their differences.

What adds depth to this seemingly simple story is Margulies's portrayal of multiple perspectives. In a "He Said She Said" style dialogue, the spotlight goes back and forth between the four friends, making them all three-dimensional and realistic. Any Hollywood expectations to see Tom and Beth work through their marital issues are betrayed when Tom and Beth find happiness in new relationships.

Director Jill Landaker '04 encourages us to be accepting of this not happily-ever-after ending. "We should all walk away from this theater with less certainty than we entered it with," she said, "As these characters begin the action of this play with a greater understanding than they possess by its end."

Aided by the sufficiently minimalist set and props, the actors' brilliant performances bring color to the stage. Evans and Goren are convincing as the gastronomy-obsessed couple who are so in sync that they can finish each other's sentences, while Harkness and Sheena successfully portrays the couple who have nothing in common but a passionate rage that entangles them in a bed-wrestle. The transparency of the fourth wall, whether deliberate or not, invited the audience into each scene to contemplate the big question: Do practical matters outweigh abandon in a relationship like Tom and Beth's?

The play explores the effect of our personal decisions on those around us. Interestingly, the characters of Gabe, Karen, Tom and Beth are so intertwined it seems more like a quadrangular marriage. One notices a sense of competition between the two marriages, but at the same time, the codependency between the two couples makes one worry about the future of the foursome as a whole.

The emphasis on internal rather than external change is what both flatters and demeans the play. The only criticism of "Dinner with Friends" one could mention is that, at times, the dialogue seemed overly drawn out and cyclical; even this, however, rendered the depiction of marital life and conflict all the more realistic.

"Dinner with Friends" could have easily been an utter flop, considering the delicate themes that it addressed underneath its ostensibly lighthearted title. Judging from the applause that it received, however, the play was a triumphant interpretation of modern relationships. The play, after all, ends on a positive note, with Gabe and Karen rekindling the lost fire in their marriage and Tom and Beth starting new beginnings for themselves.