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Simon's Dinner Party leaves audience hungry
Megan Vo
Staff Reporter
What would you do if someone locked you in a room with all of your exes and asked you to reconsider? Would you behave with grace and dignity, or get violent with a butter knife? Neil Simon explores these questions in The Dinner Party, his 31st comedic play, which opened on Broadway in 2001 and ran from Jan. 6 through Feb 1. this year at the Cleveland Play House, under the direction of Peter Hackett.
So what would you do if you had another chance? Simon’s vision throws three estranged couples – Claude and Mariette, Albert and Yvonne, and Andre and Gabrielle – together at a lavish and mysterious Parisian dinner party where they eventually find themselves exploring the nature of love and loss. An interesting premise, to be sure, and rampant with Simon’s trademark one-liners, but the production of The Dinner Party I saw lacked the spark and chemistry necessary to make you really want to think about love after leaving the theater. Actually, much (but not all) of the show lacked the spark and chemistry to make you really want to watch.
Another question: if you were at a dinner party where you didn’t know anyone but your ex, and it became inanely obvious that an outside party was trying to reunite you (and you really, really hated your ex) why on earth wouldn’t you just leave? Convention? Pride? Stupidity? All acceptable answers – unfortunately, not one member of the six-person cast showed a clear reason why his or her character didn’t just leave once and for all, rather than spend two hours rehashing wound after wound to no purpose.
Despite the lack of clear motivation, each of the characters was refreshingly individual; ranging everywhere from a used car salesman to a novelist to a book dealer. The cast also obviously worked on ensuring that each character remained unique; some of the mannerisms, I’m sure, were intended to make the audience laugh. I think. One particularly striking example of characterization bordering on caricature: Claude, the book dealer, as played by Kevin Hogan. Claude is a character akin to Niles from Frasier – terse and aloof, yet comical; Hogan, however, took terse and aloof and changed them to choppy and self-important, and somehow managed to deprive some absolutely brilliant lines of their innate humor. A shame really; at times I wanted to laugh, but it was awkward with nothing really to laugh at.
The least enjoyable scene of the play was also, sadly, the first. Claude is seen standing in the elaborate private dining room, when his reverie is interrupted by Albert, played by Steve McCue as an overgrown five-year-old with ADHD, or John Ritter on a bad day, I haven’t yet decided. What follows is a painfully clumsy attempt at banter which failed largely because of the actors’ lack of synchronization. This is all cut short by the arrival of the honestly excellent David Brummel as Andre, an older and wiser divorcee, whose comedic timing and dry delivery helped to quicken the pace and throw some humor back into many of the jokes.
Then the women arrive, and one by one face confrontation with their former husbands. Simon’s script exposes the many ways a marriage, or any partnership, can go wrong; jealousy over one another’s successes, silence and fear of communication, loss of self-respect, to name just a few.
At this point I began to think, well gosh, how encouraging! Why bother getting married at all, if hate and self-loathing are all the good that may come? Then Gabrielle, Andre’s ex-wife, and the mastermind behind the whole dinner party, compels each of the others to share his or her happiest memory of marriage, to remember that it wasn’t all bad.
Gabrielle, while, for lack of a better word, creepy (it was her idea to lock all the doors and make people talk about their feelings), represents the hope for love in this whole hate-fest, thanks to Cynthia Darlow’s self-possession and incredible stage presence. Gabrielle’s determination is the entire reason the other couples consider reconciliation – or at least, closure – and her belief in love helps ease all the negativity, despite rejection after rejection. Together, Darlow and Brummel stole every scene with the subtlety and grace that can only come from experience.
After all was said and done, and the heartache and happiness melted into the curtain, I couldn’t help but think: what might a more unified cast have brought to this show? And what would this cast do with a second chance?
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