Dinner With Friends

By Donald Margulies

This play is about two couples Gabe and Karen, and Tom and Beth. Both couples are
married and have children together, but one of them, Tom and Beth, is getting a divorce
because Tom fell in love with another woman named Nancy. The play starts with Beth, Gabe
and Karen having dinner at Gabe and Karen’s, and Beth revealing to them that Tom and her
are going to get divorced, she tells them about Tom meeting this new woman and falling in
love with her. The play basically puts the reader or expectator to see the two couples in a
contrasting way, how one has a good relationship and still finds ways to amuse one another
and the other one about how it can actually get pretty boring and monotonous. I also think
maybe Tom victimizes when he has the conversation he had with Beth when he was the one
to leave her for another woman, not really minding their children together or the relationship
per se, they have built throughout all those years together. And later on, when he meets with
Tom, to me there seems just something off about the way he wanted to paint to him that he
was doing so “great” now that he is no longer with Beth, it felt fake to me somehow, he was
tense, he seems like he’s not quite sure he made the right decision, only because of the fact
that he cannot even stop talking about the “why” he did what he did and “how” he
understand it was the best thing to have happened, they could have catched up talking
about anything else apart from that, to me it felt like he needed someone to talk to.