Hart has degrees in English literature and in creative writing. She is a freelance editor and published writer In this essay, she looks at what Margulies has done in Dinner with Friends to help articulate issues in people's lives that have remained unexpressed.

Margulies' Dinner with Friends is about what happens to couples and relationships when the illusion of solidity comes face to face with abrupt and shattering change. The experience can be as devastating as an earthquake: the sudden realization that the earth, which at one moment feels rock-hard underfoot, suddenly feels, at best, as insubstantial as a great pool of rolling waves. Then there are the aftershocks. That's where the point of Margulies' play is focused, on the aftershocks, the reflections on the meanings of the initial jolts of change.

When Margulies says, in an interview with Theron Albis, that his intention with this play...