By Robert Bethune
Somewhere in the back of my brain lurks a ghost story about a group of perfect strangers who find themselves called together to form a dinner party. I wonder if that same ghost story was at the back of Neil Simon's mind eight years ago when he wrote "The Dinner Party," now in production at The Tipping Point Theatre? If so, he played a change on the old story, because the ghosts in this play are all in the lives of the six people called together in a similarly mysterious dinner party, and the people turn out to know the others – or at least some of the others – altogether too well.
Tipping Point's production is crisp, stylish and intensely interesting. Charlie Gaidica's setting is just right; the private room of an upscale restaurant, it has that odd combination of luxury with the institutionality such places always seem to have. Jennifer Steger's costuming expresses these stylish, yet artificial people to a T.
Director Christina Johnson is bold enough to take on this Simon as if it were Shaw, which indeed it resembles. It is written not in the casual, clumsy language of everyday life, but in the fully formed, consciously elaborated, rhetorical and witty manner suited to a play of ideas. Simon's gift for language, which made him the absolute master of the crackling one-liner, leads him here to establish a language for crackling ideas, the wit of live thought, fully expressed. It does not always sound natural; I don't think it is meant to. The play is partly like a laboratory demonstration; the production appropriately keeps a cold edge, finely honed. Simon takes a scalpel to his characters with the skill and dispassion of a fine surgeon; their anatomized hearts could not be more clearly and clinically dissected.
The play may not be to everyone's taste, but if you want to try laughing and thinking at the same time, this production is the place to be.
What a breath of fresh air!
REVIEW:
'The Dinner Party'
Tipping Point Theatre, 361 E. Cady St., Northville. Thu.-Sun. (except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day) through Jan. 4. Tickets: $18-$28. For information: 248-347-0003 or http://www.tippingpointtheatre.org
