Viewing page 38 of 59

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image- four people at a table, three sitting and one standing]]
[[image- headshot]]
HAROLD SHAPIRO PHOTOGRAPHER

MARRIAGE Á LA MARGULIES by Harry Haun

Nobody gently demurs anymore -- except for Donald Margulies when someone accuses him of understanding marriage. "I don't, really," he gently demurs, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (his play, Dinner with Friends, at the Variety Arts). "The play is an attempt to understand it well, but I don't think I really understand it. I share much with Gabe, who is unabashedly my stand-in, trying to thrash out what being an adult is."
More than one scene in this thought-filled new comedy-drama fades out on Gabe (Matthew Arkin) pondering the domestic complexities that have been dropped on his doorstep. He is a food writer, and his passion for cooking is shared by his wife Karen (Lisa Emery). They like nothing better than to prepare elaborate feasts for their best friends, Tom (Kevin Kilner) and Beth (Julie White) -- a couple they were instrumental in creating more than a dozen years ago. And now Marriage No. 2 has gone awry, and this cozy foursome starts fragmenting.
"I've had the opportunity to see this play a few times now," says Marguiles, "and what has been really thrilling to me is that the audience is utterly listening. There's not a candy wrapper being rustled. It's so quiet. People are really attending to it."
And why not? The given -- one couple coming apart, one couple pressing on -- is fraught with emotional identifications."I want people to see reflections of their own

[[column 2]]
lives," admits the man with the mirror. "One of the truly gratifying thigns that I've experienced watching people watch this play occurred at South Coast Rep in Orange County. Tom is describing to Gabe how Beth wouldn't touch him anymore and how he was just craving contact and affection, and I noticed this woman put her arm around her husband. I thought, 'Isn't that lovely -- she's maybe thinking about her own behavior and responding to it?'
"I don't mean that the play serves as a marital-aid function. I don't mean to be pedantic at all. What I strive to do in any of my plays is to tell the truth and if I can be as nakedly truthful about my own perception of being in mid-life in a long-term relationship, then the best-case scenario is that the audiences will find something they can relate to, too.
"This is a quieter landscape than some of my other plays, but what it has in common with just about everything I've ever written is a sense of loss. That permeates this play as it does The Loman Family Picnic or Sight Unseen or Collected Stories. So much of life experience is breathing the passage of something and embracing something else as things metamorphose and change and disappear altogether. That's one of the things that has interested me all along as a writer."
Above: Donald Marguiles (inset) and (from l.) Lisa Emery, Matthew Arkin, Julie White and Kevin Kilner in a scene from Dinner with Friends
WWW.PLAYBILL.COM PURE THEATRE ONLINE

[[page 2]]
A conversation with Tom Gualtieri of Naked Boys Singing!
Singin' in the Buff by Jerry Tallmer
One recent night at the Actors' Playhouse, the little old 170-seat theatre just below Sheridan Square where Naked Boys Singing! has been SRO since last July, two customers in the second row had been talking to one another all through the performance and were still gabbing away tete-a-tete when it came time for Tom Gualtieri to do his big Robert Mitchum number.

John Marcus
[[image- man dancing]]
Tom Gualtieri makes a fool of himself over Robert Mitchum in Naked Boys Singing!

Gualtieri stepped forward and out of character "Gentlemen," he said as he eyeballed the misbehaving duo, "the century is coming to a close, and we need to do a song." It stopped them in their tracks, and then when he broke forth with his paean to Hollywood's bad boy of the 40's and 50's (through lyrics by Mark Winkler, music by Shelly Markham), it stopped the show.
"It's a song about a macho tough guy," says the slim, ingratiating 31-year-old actor/singer, "but I've sort of turned it on its ear. When I first heard it on the cast album from the Los Angeles production, I didn't think it was for me. I mean, a song about a tough guy should be sung by a tough guy. I'm more of a scrappy charac-
[[column 2]]
ter actor. I certainly don't see myself as a sex symbol. So as I do it, it's more like a guy who turns into a big girl in the presence of someone [Mitchum] so overwhelmingly masculine. Like Judy Garland singing to Clark Gable. That's what I'm thinking of as I sing it."
Gualtieri says it took him a while to convince Robert Schrock, the creator and director, first in Los Angeles, then here, of Naked Boys Singing!, that that was the right way to do the Mitchum song -- "the only really flamboyant number in the show."
THere was also the night that Gualtieri spotted a gentleman with a video camera in the audience. "I walked off the stage, went right up to him, pointed at him with one hand and with the other hand pointed to the stage manager. I mean, if they want pornography, they can go and buy it -- better."
There is, as advertised, a totality of nudity of the eight naked boys, or young men, who are singing in Naked Boys Singing! There is a considerable amount of what might be called sophomoric humor. But there is, as porno goes these days, nothing that would bother your Aunt Emma in Dubuque. And none that bothered Pat Castrucci, Tom Gualtieri's mother from Jersey City, when she came to see the show.
Gualtieri feels there's definitely "a stigma" attached, even now, to performing in the buff. He'd never done it before, though back at Syracuse University )after eight years in Catholic schools) he'd wanted to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream with no clothes on. "The director said: 'No, I don't think that's necessary.'"
The flak even comes from fellow actors. "One guy said to me: 'I'm always embarrassed for my friends when they appear naked in a show' -- and he's playing a fork in Beauty and the Beast!," said Gualtieri with what would be a Robert Mitchum grin if he'd let it break through.