Abstract In Dinner with Friends (1999), which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2000, Donald Margulies stages two couples – one of them impacted by the other’s divorce – and he uses food to evaluate the characters’ response to a marital breakup. Sociologically, food and eating rituals help characterize communities and identities, and in Dinner with Friends, the characters’ culinary choices become revelatory features of their bourgeois community. In the midst of a friendship crisis, Margulies uses culinary talks to examine East Coast intelligentsia. Beyond their specific approach to ethnic food, he sheds some light on the invisible consequences of their expertise as foodies, bearers of inflexible norms, who resort to soft power to assert their immutable principles. Viewed through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, the enactment of eating strategies – not to mention people’s capacity to cook a good meal – will serve to analyze connections between food and power. Beyond thematic aspects illustrating a crisis, Margulies’s dramatic use of food may reveal his aesthetic strategies in performing crisis.

中文翻译：

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与朋友共进晚餐的失败蛋奶酥危机

摘要 在 2000 年获得普利策戏剧奖的《与朋友共进晚餐》(1999) 中，唐纳德·马古利斯 (Donald Margulies) 上演了两对夫妇——其中一对受到另一对离婚的影响——他用食物来评估角色对婚姻破裂的反应。在社会学上，食物和饮食仪式有助于塑造社区和身份，在与朋友共进晚餐中，人物的烹饪选择成为他们资产阶级社区的启示特征。在友谊危机中，玛格丽丝利用烹饪谈话来审视东海岸的知识分子。除了他们对民族食品的具体做法之外，他还阐明了他们作为美食家的专业知识的无形后果，他们是僵化规范的承担者，他们诉诸软实力来维护他们不变的原则。通过劳伦·伯兰特的残酷乐观的镜头来看，饮食策略的制定——更不用说人们做一顿美餐的能力了——将有助于分析食物和权力之间的联系。除了说明危机的主题方面外，玛格丽斯对食物的戏剧性使用可能会揭示他在表演危机时的审美策略。