John Dossett is sitting down Sept. 19 for Dinner With Friends, the hit Off-Broadway staging of the domestic, rueful comedy that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Dossett, late of Ragtime, joins the company of Sophie Hayden, Matthew Arkin and Carolyn McCormick. He plays the wandering husband of McCormick's character in the play about marrieds uneasily creeping into middle-age malaise.
Dossett replaces Jonathan Walker, who came on board March 21 and departed the production Sept. 17.
A Los Angeles staging of Dinner With Friends plays the Geffen Theatre, Sept. 26-Oct. 29.
* Dinner With Friends opened at the Variety Arts Theatre Nov. 4, 1999, with Arkin, Lisa Emery, Kevin Kilner and Julie White, and has been an audience favorite since.
Margulies, the author of Collected Stories and Sight Unseen, cooked up a serious comedy drama about a dissolving marriage and the disillusioned friends left behind. Daniel Sullivan (The Heidi Chronicles, I'm Not Rappaport) directs. The play about divorce and unsure friendships, was previously seen at Actors Theatre of Louisville and (in a revised form) South Coast Repertory Theatre. In New York, the play has been embraced as intelligent, dry and grown up.
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The world premiere of the four-character, two-couple Dinner With Friends (about a pair of successful food writers, and an artist and a lawyer) was part of the 1998 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Kentucky. The revised version was staged by Sullivan at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, CA, in October 1998.
Designers in New York are Neil Patel (set), Jess Goldstein (costumes), Rui Rita (lighting).
Dinner With Friends is produced by Mitchell Maxwell, Mark Balsam, Ted Tulchin, Victoria Maxwell, Mari Nakachi and Steven Tulchin.
The Variety Arts Theatre is at 110 Third Ave. at 13th Street. Call (212) 239-6200 for ticket information.
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The Geffen production, with Daniel Sullivan recreating his Off Broadway staging, is produced in association with the New York producers, who plan to take the L.A. production to the Wilbur Theatre in Boston Nov. 4-19.
-- By Kenneth Jones
