Maskers play touches on wedded ‘mess’

“Dinner with Friends,” presented by the Belfast Maskers through May 25, is a play about marriage. It’s not about how great marriage is, or how bad marriage is. Donald Margulies’ 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is about how messy marriage is: good, bad or indifferent – all of which are plumbed in this script.

The opening scene takes place after a superb gourmet meal at the Martha’s Vineyard weekend home of Gabe and Karen, food writers whose recipe tests are often the setting for evenings and outings with Beth and Tom, their oldest friends. Except this time, Tom is absent. At first, it sounds as if he is away on one of his many business trips. But as the evening wears on, Beth reveals that Tom has left her for another woman.

That’s when things get messy. Gabe is shocked into silence. Karen explodes with anger. Beth cries. What about the children? What about vacations? What about more dinner with friends?

In two hours, the two couples wrestle their relationships to the mat, throwing emotional punches and trying to find a way to make sense of trauma. Tom goes off with this new girlfriend and finds freedom and clarity. Beth puts spark back in her own life. Ironically, it’s Gabe and Karen who are left with the heaviest baggage. Their fight is with complacency.

Maskers director Tobin Malone has undertaken a drama fraught with delicious theatrical difficulty, one typically beyond the reach of a community theater. And in some ways, this script overreaches the talents of this company. The pacing misses the New York second and settles more into a country mile, and the action is often overchoreographed and stilted.

For her own part, Malone cheerfully looks for the happy underside to the domestic catastrophes, using scene changes with rock ‘n’ roll interludes to lighten the intensity of the plot and play up the humor as much as possible. Fair enough. There’s a need for comic relief here, but it causes a chasm between the lighter moments of the play and the harsher ones, such as a marital sex scene that she floods with malevolent red light.

And yet, to Malone’s great credit, this production is not without emotion and effect. The cast – Dave Woodbury (Gabe), Johanna Stinson (Karen), Kathleen Horan (Beth) and Greg Closter (Tom) – may not be the most experienced actors, but they find true moments onstage and, when they do, Margulies’ script comes to life with full power.

Clearly, “Dinner with Friends,” which was made into an HBO movie a few years ago, traverses adult territory. There are mature situations, strong language and potent commentary on contemporary friendship, marriage and family life. The ending is poignantly, frighteningly ambiguous, no matter how much tenderness Malone infuses it with. Don’t be surprised if the final scene sends you looking into your own heart, if not your own bedroom.

The Belfast Maskers will present “Dinner with Friends” Thursday-Sunday through May 25 at the Railroad Theater on Water Street in Belfast. For information, call 338-9668.