Dinner with Friends is set in suburban Connecticut and follows two couples, longtime friends, whose lives are shaken by a marital breakup. Over coffee and cake, Gabe and Karen first learn that the marriage of their best friends, Tom and Beth, is falling apart. As Tom and Beth each tell their side of the story, Gabe and Karen begin to reexamine their own relationship and sense the horrors of staying together. They are shocked by what is revealed of their friends’ lives, and question the nature of friendship and how much a friend should confide. Are our friends seen clearly as the people they are--or through the prism of our own expectations? Dinner with Friends is not about the breakup of a marriage, but the shockwaves that spread mercilessly from the rupture of a marriage.

By Donald Margulies
Directed by Laura James

Donald Margulies' first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre in the early 1980s. In 1992, his play Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include The Loman Family Picnic; Pitching to the Star; Zimmer; Luna Park; What's Wrong With This Picture?; The Model Apartment; Broken Sleep; July 7, 1994; The God of Vengeance; and Collected Stories, a play about a Jewish writer who is betrayed by her young disciple, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre.

Laura James directed the West Coast premiere of Quartet at Theatre 40 in 2007, and has been an actor, director and teacher for many years. As an actress, she has worked extensively on network TV, in soaps, episodics and feature films. She costarred with Marion Ross at San Diego’s Globe Theatre, worked with Shakespeare & Co. in Maine and with Georges Bigot of Le Theatre du Soleil, and performed a number of one-woman shows at the John Anson Ford Theatre. Her directorial credits include The Skin of Our Teeth at Idyllwild Conservatory and numerous productions at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she also teaches. She has directed/produced various productions at Theatre West, most recently a production called Bump.