A Fallen-Soufflé Crisis in Dinner with Friends

Thierry Dubost

doi:10.1515/jcde-2020-0022

Article

A Fallen-Soufflé Crisis in Dinner with Friends

Thierry Dubost

Published/Copyright: November 12, 2020

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 8 Issue 2

Abstract

In Dinner with Friends (1999), which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2000, Donald Margulies stages two couples – one of them impacted by the other’s divorce – and he uses food to evaluate the characters’ response to a marital breakup. Sociologically, food and eating rituals help characterize communities and identities, and in Dinner with Friends, the characters’ culinary choices become revelatory features of their bourgeois community. In the midst of a friendship crisis, Margulies uses culinary talks to examine East Coast intelligentsia. Beyond their specific approach to ethnic food, he sheds some light on the invisible consequences of their expertise as foodies, bearers of inflexible norms, who resort to soft power to assert their immutable principles. Viewed through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, the enactment of eating strategies – not to mention people’s capacity to cook a good meal – will serve to analyze connections between food and power. Beyond thematic aspects illustrating a crisis, Margulies’s dramatic use of food may reveal his aesthetic strategies in performing crisis.

Keywords: Donald Margulies; Dinner with Friends; food; aesthetics; norms; rituals; cruel optimism; crisis

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Published Online: 2020-11-12

Published in Print: 2020-11-03

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https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2020-0022

Keywords for this article

Donald Margulies; Dinner with Friends; food; aesthetics; norms; rituals; cruel optimism; crisis