David Margulies takes Chekhov to heart by making a middle-class soirée the setting for 'Dinner With Friends', writes Peter Crawley.

'Let everything on stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple, as it is in life," wrote Anton Chekhov in 1887. "People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the while their happiness is being established or their lives are falling apart."

In Dinner With Friends, his Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 2000, the Connecticut-based Jewish-American playwright Donald Margulies appears to have taken the father of naturalism at his word. Only, in its opening scene, he manages to establish the happiness of a solidly married couple, Karen and Gabe, while allowing their friends' marriage to fall apart. It's a rare play that can serve up its themes so neatly - and a rarer one still that does it between grilled lamb with pumpkin risotto and a lemon almond polenta cake.

"For these people - like me, like people I know - food has become an almost sensual aspect of life," says Margulies. He is speaking in his office, a house in New Haven built in 1840, where he writes and negotiates with his "very drippy, sheddy cat, who refuses to die". Margulies expands his epicurean theme. "Food and cooking, and serving friends, and offering sustenance, and a kind of aesthetic/ sensuous pleasure, I think, has become more a part of our culture."

Without seeing the play, which has its Irish première courtesy of Gúna Nua at Andrews Lane Theatre tonight, such talk might sound indulgent, even frivolous. That, however, may be precisely the point. Once the happily married gourmands are faced with breakdown, suddenly it seems the stability of marriage, of institutions, of society itself can be ruptured by indulging our appetites. And those all-American appetites are no longer sated by apple-pie values. "Where would we be with everybody's ids running rampant?" worries Gabe as his own superego takes a bruising.

The name Margulies (pronounced Mar-gyu-leeze, "with a long 'u'," he explains) is of Lithuanian-Austrian origin; it is also Yiddish for pearl. Born in 1954, Margulies, the son of a wallpaper salesman, grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn. He studied graphic design before giving it up to write plays, suffering critical drubbings from the New York Times long before his play Sight Unseen was shortlisted for the Pulitzer and put him on the national radar. "Revenge is a very strong motivator," he laughs.

He describes his upbringing as "a lower-middle-class situation" and politely bristles at the idea that the characters of Dinner With Friends - witty, frothy professionals, such as food writers, artists and lawyers, who spend their summers in Martha's Vineyard - might be considered bourgeois. "I have to say that I am depicting a comfortable middle class, not quite upper middle class. The bourgeois seems a little out of my reach, because I don't really know that world. . . . Let's just call them comfortable without using the word bourgeois."

Margulies, who teaches playwriting at Yale University (and whose wife, Lynn Street, is a physician), may now seem quite comfortable, but he is hesitant to admit to any class satire in his drama. "See, satire to me is a fairly limited venue," he says as though through a grimace. "I think that these are three-dimensional characters that are of a certain time and place. I can't say that I wish to skewer them in any way. But in the true depiction of an echelon of society, undoubtedly you're going to poke fun. People are going to see themselves in ways that make them laugh."

It is almost inevitable, though, that audiences will see Dinner With Friends as a gauge for contemporary America, and here Margulies does not discourage us. When Tom, the adulterer, goes to Karen and Gabe to give his side of the story he is accused of coming to "lobby for our support. That's very politic of you". Later, when partnerships characterised by safety and security, then lies and fear, finally reach a crossroads, it may be hard for contemporary audiences to escape a flicker of the US presidential elections. Will they make a break or ride it out?

"It's my belief that the best kind of political theatre are the plays which do not have a political agenda," says Margulies. "I think that when stories are told well, intelligent observers are bound to find resonances in society that have a political weight, but I can't say honestly that I set out to write a political play. The fact that when you create a play about relationships, and you try to do it as truthfully as possible, with all the nuance of real life and all of the flaws of human nature, it will then translate into a political statement, whether you intended it or not."

Dinner With Friends, as Margulies tells it, has its roots more firmly in his own marriage. "It was something that I had to write at that particular time. My wife and I, who have been together a long time, began to experience all these domestic catastrophes around us. Relationships that we thought were as solid as ours, which we thought were fixtures in our life, were beginning to disintegrate, and rather tumultuously. . . . In some ways it is the most nakedly personal [ play] and in other ways it's conjecture.

"In writing close to home, so to speak, one needs to reinvent what you already know about something. You need to raise the stakes, to turn it into something you can look at objectively. . . . I am all of these characters, the men and the women both, and I don't come down harshly on any one side. We're always learning something about the people that we've made judgments about, and the things that we learn force us to reconsider our preconceived ideas."

Proud of his 26-year marriage and straightforward about his achievements, Margulies admits to a darkness in his work that rarely enters his conversation. His most recent play, Brooklyn Boy, for instance, sounds almost unbearably personal. Though Dinner With Friends sparkles with wit and intelligence, ensuring its moral twists and turns will be guided by laughter, Margulies recognises its undercurrent of fear. "After 9/11, I wondered, how would the play play? When I did see it, it took on an even more emotional, existential tone, which from my point of view is gratifying, in a sick kind of way. You know what I mean?" For one thing, fraying the fabric of marriage and society became less a question of who would put the kids to bed or keep the buses running and more about human fragility.

"I think it did," he says. "Particularly in the final scene, when we really should have a sense of this couple clinging to each other in the abyss. And I think that the abyss has become a much broader image in people's minds. It's more specific, in a way. It's a sense of spending your life with someone because life is something that is much more fragile than we would have been led to believe it was. That our stability is much more fragile, as a society and not just as a unit. Our place in that society is really quite delicate."

For anyone in a relationship - married or unmarried, straight or gay - Dinner With Friends asks uneasy questions of unity and friendship, sexual abandon and abandoned sex. Inevitably, it gets under the skin. Margulies recalls a man in New York who left at the interval, telling his friends, 'Look, this is just too close to home." A 20-year-old once told him she now understood why her father had left. "It is a reflection of life that people will either squirm at or squirm at and learn from," says Margulies. How many shaky marriages does he think he has managed to nudge off the rails? "Oh," he says, "I suspect a good number."

Dinner With Friends opens at Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin, tonight