In it, Tokyo drama student Toru sees his history of complicated relationships come to a head while he’s out to dinner at a French restaurant with a classmate and his girlfriend. Haruki Murakami’s fifth novel catapulted the writer to fame in Japan with its critique of the hollowness he perceived in his country’s 1960s counterculture. Dalloway” charts the unsteady trajectory of a handful of post-World War I London society members as they prepare for a gathering at Clarissa Dalloway’s home, at which old passions, bad blood and distressing news each make an appearance: “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death.” “Norwegian Wood” (1987) “Top Girls” (1982)įeaturing perhaps the most fussed-about dinner party in literature, “Mrs. Driven mad by this illusion, he bursts into a fit of guilty rage, causing his guests to scatter. The psychological torment permeating William Shakespeare’s tale of regicide and bloodlust is made hauntingly manifest in the middle of its five acts when the newly crowned king sees the ghost of Banquo, a friend he’d ordered killed, sit in his place at the table. Couples re- and decouple, bitterness is the entree, and the guests strive mightily at ‘keeping control / while falling apart.’ Although the scene takes place in Sweden around 1900, one could imagine it reset and regendered - and with less eloquence - at a dinner party in the Fire Island Pines today.” - Mark Campbell, librettist “Macbeth” (1606) “The second act’s banquet scene in Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim’s musical begins mid-laugh and unravels from there. Guest Pick: “A Little Night Music” (1973) The meal doesn’t go remotely as planned, but Amanda keeps clinging to her hopes for the “gentleman caller” until her illusions are finally cracked. In Tennessee Williams’s “memory play,” based on his own fraught family relationships, the faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield makes her son invite a co-worker over for dinner with the intention of setting him up with her shy, disabled daughter. With the help of some guest nominators, we’ve assembled a list of fictional dinner parties that epitomize the possibilities of the genre.Ī family comes together to mourn the loss of their patriarch and winds up coming undone in Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, their brokenness laid bare during an act-long memorial dinner at which the matriarch, deep into her losing battle with a prescription pill addiction, insults her relatives past the point of no return. And since even the most informal dinner party is a kind of ritual, with its own customs and practices, it can be especially thrilling when the rules are shattered as easily as a wineglass. Tags 59E59 Theaters Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre Arthur Miller Atlantic Theater Company BAM Harvey Theater Bradford Cover Broadway Brooklyn Academy of Music Classic Stage Company Cort Theatre Edward Albee Eugene O'Neill George Bernard Shaw Hamlet Harold Pinter Irene Diamond Stage Irish Repertory Theatre John Golden Theatre Linda Gross Theater Lucille Lortel Theater Manhattan Theatre Club New York Theatre Workshop Playwrights Horizons Polonsky Shakespeare Center Rachel Botchan Rattlestick Playwrights Theater Red Bull Theater Richard III Robert Langdon Lloyd Roundabout Theatre Company Samuel Beckett Samuel J.Dinner parties, real or imagined, have long been a highly reliable source of drama: Whether joyful, combative, filled with laughter or dread, they offer filmmakers, playwrights and novelists a chance to explore what happens when characters who’ve known one another their whole lives - or who only just met - face off across a table. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
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