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On The Bookshelf:
`What You Owe

68

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN

Special to the Jewish News

T

Donald Margulies
ponders divorce
in Pulitzer
Prize-winning
"Dinner
With Friends"
at Detroit's
Gem Theatre.

he French box office workers were decidedly underwhelmed when
Jewish American playwright Donald Margulies arrived for the open-
ing of his Dinner With Friends at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees
in Paris in 1999.
Impatient with his pidgin French, they brusquely shooed him aside to
wait on native patrons. "It was just so French," notes Margulies, who was
once dubbed "my Jewish playwright" by the impresario Joe Papp.
"They knew who I was. They just didn't have any time for me."
Fortunately, the Pulitzer committee male time for Margulies,
who won the coveted prize for Friends in April 2000. The play,
about the effect of divorce on a yuppie couple and their best
friends, opens Sept. 5 at the Gem Theatre in Detroit.
Dinner With Friends began, as does all of Margulies' work,
with an observation that troubled him. The now 47-year-
old playwright had arrived in midlife, married for 13
years to a physician he had been with almost half his life.
They had a young son, Miles, a standard poodle named
Beckett, a Burmese cat and a cozy home in New
Haven, Conn. But all around them, relationships were
crumbling.
"Couples I had thought were constant were suddenly
combusting," Margulies says, speaking by telephone
from his New Haven study. The "succession of domes-
tic catastrophes" led to a comedy-drama about what
happens to relationships over time; the piece culmi-
nates with one character's dream of two couples in her
marital bed: herself and her husband in youth and in
middle age.
Dinner may be the author's least specifically
Jewish play, but it's vintage Margulies. "What it
shares with all my work," he says, "is an overriding
sense of loss."
The feeling, he suggests, stems from his childhood
in the Jewish "high-rise ghettos" of Brooklyn and
Coney Island, surrounded by Holocaust survivors who
"instilled in me a kind of fatalism and morbid fascina-
tion for recent Jewish history."
At age 5, Margulies asked about the concentration
camp tattoo on his neighbor Ida's arm; at 11, he read
Death of a Salesman and felt "guilt and shame ... for recog-
nizing in the Lomans truths about my own family."
His father, then barely 40, was an overworked wallpaper
salesman, "physically affectionate but prone to mysterious
silences." For decades, he lived in fear of losing a job he loathed.
It was only after Bob Margulies' death at 62 in 1987 that the author
was able to explore his feelings about his father in The Loman Family Picnic.
What's Wrong With This Picture? was inspired by a nightmare Margulies
had three weeks after his mother unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1978.
In the dream (and the play), the doorbell rings during the family's shivah; the
writer opens the door only to find his mother covered in mud from the grave.
"I don't even want to talk about it," she snaps. "I just want to jump in the shower."

FOOD FOR THOUGHT on page 64