‘Dinner With Friends’: A Little Noshing, But No Meal

Marriage is a platform on which partners erect a structure of expectation and experience held together by tradition, children and sex. Or, put another way, marriage could be a dance where each holds the other tight, neither knowing the steps. These assessments might very well paraphrase playwright Donald Margulies’ ‘Dinner with Friends,’ the 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning play which opened Friday night at Pierson Playhouse for a six-week run. In this Theatre Palisades production, directed by Hope Villanueva, Margulies’ lacerating examination of marriage is meant to elicit uncomfortable audience reaction, and it does. Anybody who is married or has been involved in a long-term relationship will recognize the terrain. Two couples’Karen (Alexandra Raines) and Gabe (Josh Matthies), Beth (Elizabeth Laird) and Tom (Sean Spence)’have been friends for a decade, sharing vacations, child-rearing activities and the easygoing conversations friends enjoy. This comfortable foursome suddenly is rocked out of equilibrium when in the first act Beth reveals while at Karen and Gabe’s for dinner that Tom has left her for another woman. Suddenly, this family, as Karen refers to their friendship, is shaken up. Through many conversations’Karen with Gabe, Karen and Beth, Gabe and Tom, and most painfully Tom and Beth’playwright Margulies finally gets to the nut of the drama. Towards the end of the second act, Gabe and Tom meet in a bar for a drink and talk. Tom explains that his new partner, Nancy, is everything Beth was not. The sex is easy and comfortable, she’s 100 percent there, she listens. Gabe’s response voices the truth we all come to realize as we grow up and gain wisdom, while mourning the loss of the aphrodisiac of new love. ‘We spend our youths unconscious,’ says Gabe, wisfully reflecting on the passage of time. In a marriage, you make mistakes, ‘but the key is to say, made a mistake, too bad, you have to live with it. The key is to resist chucking it all.’ This play stings more than it provokes reflection. The dialogue is closer to overheard cell phone conversation than the poetic irony of Ibsen. While the actors must relish this script because of its dense dialogue, it remains, like nervous noshing, far from a nourishing meal. The most revealing conversations occur between the two women and the two men because each bears some psychological truth. In the second act after Beth’s breakup, she excoriates Karen for her condescending role in their friendship. Beth has found a new love, David, and despite Karen’s caution, she feels confident and strong and set on this relationship. She observes that Karen is uncomfortable with Beth’s newfound strength. ‘I think you love it when I’m a mess,’ Beth says. ‘You got to be Miss Perfect. How was I supposed to compete with that?’ For her part, Karen reveals that she always considered Beth and Tom to be ‘family.’ Her own biological family, she remarks, was a mess, and she couldn’t get far enough away from them. To which Beth replies, ‘The family you’ve chosen is just as screwed up as the family you were born into.’ We’re all so vulnerable, so fragile, the playwright seems to be saying. We try our best, we make mistakes, we hurt one another. ‘Some of us will right the course, others blow up our homes and some take up piano,’ says Gabe, in pondering the trajectory of a marriage. Director Villanueva skillfully guides the actors through the scenes with clarity and a varied emotional tone. The actors are commendable, with particular praise for Elizabeth Laird (Beth), who so successfully conveys the roller coaster of emotions from crushing sadness and disappointment to rage and fear. Kudos to lighting and set designer Jenna Coulombe for successfully differentiating outside, inside and the passage of time, including a flashback at the beginning of Act II that finds the couples nine years earlier, when Karen and Gabe introduced Tom and Beth. ‘Dinner with Friends’ continues at Pierson Playhouse Friday and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through October 3. For tickets contact 454-1970.

For Mark Waldrep, the magic of music making lies in the way sound is recorded and produced. Sitting in his West Hollywood studio, the Palisadian audio engineer and producer says he believes his new DVD-Audio recordings sound better than live performances, and he presses ‘play’ to prove it. The pure sound of Willie Nelson and songwriter Paul Williams (Barbara Streisand’s ‘Evergreen’ and Karen Carpenter’s ‘Close to You’) singing ‘Rainbow Connection’ fills the room as if the musicians were performing right there, spontaneously deciding who sings each line. ‘This took two takes,’ says Waldrep, founder of AIX Records. ‘It just breaks me up every time I hear it.’ Having worked on behalf of musicians, singers and record labels for nearly 30 years, Waldrep is grateful for the new technologies that have allowed him to develop his newest productions’DVD-Audio/Video discs that include ‘audiophile quality music’ with 5.1 channel surround mixes (the method used in the film industry primarily for sound effects), multiple camera angle video, biographical texts and/or photos from sessions or artists. Some of the recordings have interviews with the musicians or special-interest segments such as a guitar lesson or backstage jam. AIX records an entire record in a single, four- to six-hour period in a live hall without an audience. Most of the music has been recorded in the Colburn School for Performing Arts’ Zipper Hall in Downtown L.A. ‘I love being inside music, not with people clapping,’ says Waldrep, who left his home state of Michigan in 1974 ‘to be a rock star’ in Los Angeles. When playing in a band didn’t work out, he took some classes at SMC before continuing his education at CSUN, Cal Arts and UCLA. Because the DVD-Audio/Video recordings are done in a short amount of time, usually with only two takes per tune, the musicians ‘have to be skilled enough and have been performing long enough to deliver great music in a single session,’ Waldrep says. ‘There’s no going back and fixing mistakes.’ He also wants to record bands who are ‘fun to work with and interested in what we’re doing,’ since AIX’s recording methodology is nontraditional. For example, Waldrep recently recorded a Christmas album with five musicians, including former Wings guitarist Laurence Juber and Waldrep’s favorite pianist, Jim Cox. ‘They had never played the songs together, and the DVD captures that sense of newness,’ says Waldrep, who directs the recordings with about a six-person crew. ‘The biggest high I had was working with Willie Nelson and Paul Williams on ‘Rainbow Connection’,’ he says. ‘The air became rarified because here was this icon [Nelson] taking direction from me.’ When Waldrep played two initial mixes of the recording for Paul Williams, he said the hall-of-fame songwriter looked at him and said ‘I get it, after 30 years,’ meaning that Williams finally understood what music could sound like and the magic of creating that sound. Waldrep strives for those moments that are ‘the reason people should be making records.’ AIX preserves the feeling of real-time music-making by avoiding techniques commonly used to produce recordings, such as dynamics compression, equalization, artificial reverberation and mono miking techniques. Waldrep points out that the use of stereo pairs of microphones for each instrument allows him to create a sound in which ‘the speakers disappear.’ The result is a recording that is 50 percent as loud as a normal commercial release, Waldrep says. ‘It’s quieter than anything you’ll hear on the radio, and as pure and natural an experience as you can create with technology.’ The DVD-Audio/Video discs are ‘my own creative visions,’ says Waldrep, whose company was born as the first DVD-Audio record label dedicated to new high-resolution releases. ‘It’s a pretty personal thing I’m doing.’ Over the years, he has researched, acquired and utilized state-of-the-art equipment, including a $400,000 Euphonix System 5 digital mixing console. ‘There’s been a little bit of debt along the way,’ he says, but admits that the 35 completed DVD-Audio/Video discs were ‘phenomenally less expensive’ to produce because he owns his equipment. His small company consists of four former students at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where Waldrep teaches digital media arts courses three days a week. ‘Music has an intangible ability to get in here,’ says Waldrep, putting his hand over his heart. ‘That’s what it’s always done for me.’ Waldrep has lived in the Palisades for four years with his wife, Mona, and their three kids, Kari, 20, Christopher, 18 and Michael, 16. Kari attends UC Santa Cruz and Michael is in the Highly Gifted Magnet program at North Hollywood High School. Christopher, a recent PaliHi graduate, is a member of the band Half Nelson. For more information about AIX Records, visit www.aixrecords.com or contact Mark Waldrep directly at mwaldrep@aixrecords.com or (323) 655-4116, ext. 102.

Palisadian Jack Rosenberg thinks he may be the only personal friend of Albert Einstein still alive. They first met in 1949, on Einstein’s 70th birthday, when Rosenberg was a 31-year-old electrical engineer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Einstein was a world-renowned member of the faculty. Rosenberg was working for mathematician John Von Neumann designing what would be the first central processing unit for the first digital computer. A music fan, Rosenberg had developed sophisticated audio equipment for his own personal use, which attracted the interest of mathematicians at the Institute, who asked him to build them similar systems. Professor Erwin Panofsky, a good friend of Einstein’s, heard about this music system and asked Rosenberg to make one for Einstein as a 70th birthday gift. Rosenberg did, and it was the start of a friendship. Between late 1949 and 1951 they saw each other once a month. Even after Rosenberg moved away, he visited once or twice a year until Einstein’s death in 1955. On the occasion of the Skirball Cultural Center’s upcoming Einstein exhibit, which will run from September 14 to May 29, Rosenberg shared with the Palisadian-Post his personal memories of Einstein. Rosenberg grew up in New Jersey, the son of Russian parents who were interested in classical music. He studied engineering at MIT, and was on a troop ship in the Pacific heading towards invading Japan during World War II when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This led Rosenberg to an interest in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and his first job at Princeton, working with some physics professors. After that he began work on the Johnniac, the world’s first digital computer, named after its inventor, John Von Neumann. It was while working there at the Institute of Advanced Studies, through his love of music, that Rosenberg met Einstein. Born in Germany, Einstein was 26 when he had what he called his ‘annus mirabilis’ in 1905. He published four papers (including his famous E=MC2 formula) that revolutionized present concepts of time and space, energy and matter, and that same year he received his Ph.D. from Zurich University, all while working at the Swiss Patent Office. He was a professor of theoretical physics in Prague and Zurich, and later in Berlin and received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. He joined the Institute in 1933. By the time Rosenberg met him, Einstein was a world-famous figure who spent a lot of time thinking about philosophical interests other than science. That’s what Einstein discussed with Rosenberg and his wife, Frances (who died 10 years ago). ‘I was absolutely bewildered in his presence. I was tongue-tied,’ said Rosenberg of meeting Einstein. ‘He had a lot of humility; none of the other scientists I had ever met had this. He was a man who had nothing to prove.’ Rosenberg entered Einstein’s house surreptitiously several times to set up the audio system to play FM music over the radio. One time he installed a roof antenna, and several other times he was let in by Einstein’s longtime secretary, Helen Dukas. High-fidelity audio was not commercially available at this time. Einstein was fascinated when Rosenberg brought in the three pieces of furniture’the speaker, the FM receiver and the amplifier’that made up his surprise gift. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was head of the Institute at the time, and came with Rosenberg to greet Einstein on his birthday. ‘Einstein said, ‘You’re not allowed to go in there,’ when I headed to his study,’ Rosenberg recalls. ‘I said, ‘Please, you’ll understand later.” Once he learned about the surprise gift, Einstein, an amateur violinist, had a look of pleasure on his face. ‘What could I do to repay you?’ he asked. Rosenberg asked for permission to take his picture, which he granted. Rosenberg was thrilled to have met Einstein, and thought that would be the end of their association. But a month later he received a personal note from Einstein, thanking him for the ‘singing bird’ as he called his music system, on which he enjoyed Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute.’ Several months later, professor Panofsky called, asking Rosenberg how Einstein could thank him once again for building the music system. Rosenberg asked if he could record Einstein’s voice on a recording system he had in his home. The recording device was not portable, so Einstein would have to come to the small apartment where Jack and Frances lived. In October 1949, the Rosenbergs had their interview with Einstein, who said he would answer all questions, but requested that the recording be only for their private use, and would not be made public. The Rosenbergs asked Einstein questions for half an hour, about world affairs, what he thought about the atomic bomb, his political ideas, and his favorite music. In his autobiography now in progress, Rosenberg describes Einstein’s answers as ‘shockingly candid. Many were so direct and surprising they left no room for further inquiry on that subject.’ When asked about whether he agreed we had to drop atomic bomb on Japan, Einstein said that he didn’t agree. He believed there there had been secret peace negotiations going on with Japan and they would have surrendered before the bombs were dropped. Two weeks later, Einstein’s secretary called saying that Einstein would like to have the Rosenbergs over for tea and cookies. This time, Einstein asked the questions. ‘I’m interested in what young Americans think about,’ he said. Although Jack and Frances protested that they weren’t typical young Americans, the first interview lasted two hours, and they visited once a month for the next year and a half, until they moved from Princeton. Einstein became a mentor and advisor, and was the motivating force behind the couple’s move from Princeton, claiming it was a closed society where people couldn’t speak freely. Only this year, at a lecture Rosenberg attended at Caltech, did he learn why Einstein felt that way. Caltech professor Diana Kormos Buchwald, editor of Einstein’s collected papers, explained that Dr. Abraham Flexner, head of the institute through 1939, had forbidden Einstein from speaking about his opinions publicly. Eventually, Rosenberg switched employers, and after leaving Princeton, got a job with GE in Syracuse, New York. He moved to the Palisades in 1954 to work for a subsidiary of General Dynamics. He later learned that mathematicians from Los Alamos were using the computer he worked on at the Institute for Advanced Studies to develop the hydrogen bomb. ‘I felt I had dirtied my hands,’ says Rosenberg. ‘When I mentioned it to Einstein in 1953, he said ‘I thought that was what they used it for. I thought they would find a way to design the hydrogen bomb. I feel that instead of making the U.S. more secure, this weapon has made us less secure.’ Sure enough, in the year after the U.S. exploded it, the Soviet Union also exploded its hydrogen bomb. So Einstein was right, there was no security.’ Einstein passed away in 1955 at 76, of a rupture of the aortic aneurysm. Living in the Palisades at the time, the Rosenbergs wept when they heard the news. ‘Einstein got criticism from both scientists and laypeople that he should stop spending time on political matters and world matters, and completely devote himself to science,’ Rosenberg says. ‘Even though he couldn’t solve the world’s political problems he felt he had to think about them, and when he thought about a subject, he thought about it more thoroughly than anyone else I ever met.’