TEHRAN-The play “Dinner with Friends” written by Donald Margulies is being staged at Qazvin City Theater in Qazvin Province.

Directed by Mohsen Zarei, the 75-minute play has Erfan Darzishad, Baran Allahbakhshi, Mahnaz Khoshnoud, and Mohsen Gilakzadeh in the cast.

The winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, “Dinner with Friends” is filled with humor, warmth, insight, and wisdom.

Gabe and Karen, a happily married, middle-aged couple, live in Connecticut. They have been friends with Tom and Beth, another married couple, for many years. In fact, it was Gabe and Karen who introduced their friends in the first place. While having dinner at Gabe and Karen's home, Beth tearfully reveals that she is getting a divorce from Tom, who has been unfaithful.

Tom, who had been away on business, finds out that Beth has told their friends about the looming divorce, and hastens to Gabe and Karen's home. Tom and Beth had planned to tell their friends about their breakup together, but Tom now believes that Beth unfairly has presented herself as the wronged party, and feels he must present his own side of the story.

The time flashes back 12 years to a vacation home on Martha's Vineyard when Karen and Gabe introduce Beth to Tom. Over the course of the play, both couples are seen at different ages and stages of their lives. Tom and Beth's breakup affects Gabe and Karen, who first feel compelled to choose sides, and then begin to question the strength of their own seemingly tranquil marriage. They also begin to see the real meaning behind their friendships with Tom and Beth.

It is a modern-day masterpiece on the destruction of today's marriage. Through Margulies's flawless use of language and his ability to convey the truest of dialogue and characterization, we watch, as the two couples do, our closest friends going through a wrenching breakup. Not only does he create vivid details of a marriage in decline, but 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.

The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. I

Donald Margulies, 70, is an American playwright and academic. Elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993, Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival, and the Jewish Repertory Theater. 

The play will remain on stage at Qazvin City Theater, located at Mellat Park in Qazvin, through February 3.

SS/SAB