The Collective presents 'Dinner with Friends'
Damien Furtado and Jema Tareze rehearse a scene from "Dinner with Friends." / Courtesy of Mallory Dowd
By Celeste Kriel
Expat theater group
keeps flipping scripts and is back to stage its unique take on Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama,
Ray Salcedo, co-founder of The Collective, returns as director for this year's main stage, coming off their
successful run of “Romeo and Juliet” last fall
.
The play is one of Salcedo's personal favorites and he had long been eyeing the script. Relevant to the context of the expat experience of a “chosen family,” “Dinner with Friends” surrounds two best friend couples who realize that the seemingly impermeable bonds of marriage and decade-long friendships aren't an antidote to the alienation that can occur between any of them.
"One of the main reasons we selected to stage this particular play regards one of its main themes, which surrounds the concept of family," Salcedo explains. "Based on the need for strong connections and support, many of us in the large, vibrant expatriate community here forge substitute families to fill in the geographical and emotional gaps between ourselves and the families that we leave in our homelands ― gaps that can be literally wider than an ocean. Sadly, these connections don't always survive even though these bonds can feel as strong ― or even stronger than ― those that are determined by blood or contract."
Salcedo continues, "The close-knit bond among these four best friends is essentially unraveled by the sudden announcement of divorce between two of them ― and their resultant drastic personal transformations ― forcing the other two to contemplate the strength of their own marriage."
Actor Jema Tareze, playing the role of Karen, muses on this aspect, "The show explores the depths of commitment and compromise necessary to keep a family intact while managing internal and external conflict. Karen, while often weighed down by gender roles and her own perfectionism and anxiety, is constantly striving for that elusive safe and loving home."
The Seoul-based group is known for making unique character choices. A continued focus of The Collective is to test narratives by adding levels of "otherness" ― to have a character's subjectivity or intersectional identity play a meaningful part of the story. Last year's main stage production of “Romeo and Juliet” renounced the patriarchal norm by using a matriarchal society as the backdrop of the universal story of impossible love, which saw Romeo and Juliet both played by women, and the Nurse and Lady Capulet played by men.
This year, the character they have focused on for this exploration is Beth, who was clearly written as a white American woman, but who will be played by a woman of color from South Africa ― actor Kim Schroeder, who is also The Collective's artistic director.
"The challenge is finding what her otherness means in each scene, while keeping all the dialogue the same," Salcedo says, "and fortunately our actor is up to the task."
It will premiere Saturday, Nov. 30, at Emu Artspace near Seoul Museum of History, with more performances on Dec. 1, 6, 7 and 8. The play will be in English with Korean subtitles. Tickets are 25,000 won with reservation and 30,000 won at the door. Visit
for more information.