There’s probably never been an engagement party anywhere near as drama-packed as the one now occurring nightly in Westwood as the Geffen Playhouse treats Angelinos to the West Coast Premiere of Samuel Baum’s gasp-aloud, plot-twisty The Engagement Party.

The couple announcing their betrothal to assembled friends and family are 30-year-olds Josh (Jonah Platt) and Katherine (Bella Heathcote), he the bar mitzvahed product of blue-collar southeast Brooklyn, she the daughter of mainline Protestant wealth.

And invited over to their swanky Upper East Side digs are Katherine’s multimillionaire businessman father Conrad (Richard Bekins) and her Southern belle mother Gail (Wendie Malick); Kai (Brian Lee Huynh) and Alan (Mark Jacobson), Josh’s two best friends from their student days at Harvard; Kai’s physician wife Hayley (Lauren Worsham), who’s also Katherine’s longtime bff and the mother of a nine-month-old; and Italian-American ex-marine Johnny (Brian Patrick Murphy), who’s known Josh since they were two-year-olds on the mean streets of Canarsie and has maintained the Brooklynese to prove it.

 It quickly becomes clear that Josh, Kai, and Alan now share little in terms of financial status or political beliefs despite their Harvard friendships,

There’s no way, for instance, that Kai is raking in yearly bonuses of well over two mil like Josh is, and while proud leftie Allen donates most of his Columbia University associate philosophy professor salary to charitable causes, Josh has just spent $300,000 on Katherine’s emerald-and-diamond engagement ring without an ounce of guilt.

Pre-dinner chitchat reveals that Josh first met his future father-in-law as an eighteen-year-old bussing tables at the exclusive private club where his mother worked the coat check, employment he gladly quit when club member Conrad offered him a job on Wall Street, though it wasn’t until he and Katherine were on their third or fourth date that Josh discovered the connection between father and daughter (or so he claims).

Playwright Baum packs The Engagement Party’s first twenty minutes with so many laughs, you might think you’re in store for a sophisticated comedy of manners, Upper East Side style, but you’d be wrong.

Things take a sudden turn towards the dramatic when Kai pulls Josh aside in the latter’s sky-high-ceilinged kitchen to ask a favor any true best friend would gladly agree to, i.e., to put in a word with Josh’s father-in-law-to-be about Hayley, who’s up for a job at the hospital where Conrad sits on the board.

Josh, however, turns his friend down flat, unwilling in Kai’s words to “put himself out there the slightest bit,” which makes Kai the prime suspect when …

From here on in, The Engagement Party drops the laugh track to become a mystery suspense edge-of-your-seater to do Agatha Christie proud, albeit minus murder.

Instead, little by little, playwright Baum reveals the cracks in decades-long friendships as long-suppressed resentments rear their ugly heads, and if there’s already been one shocking twist at the dinner table, Baum’s got a real doozy ahead, one that provoked what may hold the record as the longest and loudest in-unison audience gasp I’ve heard in my fifteen-plus years as a reviewer.

The Engagement Party’s West Coast Premiere reunites Tony-winning director Darko Tresnjak with half of the play’s original Hartford Stage cast and its entire East Coast design team, making its Geffen debut only marginally local, though at least as far as Alexander Dodge’s remarkable revolving set is concerned, the decision not to restage The Engagement Party from the ground up makes sense.

Returnees Bekins, Huynh, Murphy, and Worsham and West Coast additions Heathcote, Jacobson, Malick, and Platt deliver eight razor-sharp performances guaranteed to keep you riveted to your seat. (I especially enjoyed seeing TV icon Malick playing against type here.)

Dodge’s set, Joshua Pearson’s costumes, Matthew Richard’s lighting, and Jane Shaw’s original music and sound design are every bit as impressive as they must have been four years ago in Connecticut.

Casting is by Phyllis Schuringa, CSA. Velani Dibba is understudy director. Daniel Bonjour, Susan Denaker, Matthew Kimbrough, Ethan Kirschbaum, Robert M. Lee, and Sara Lindsey are understudies.

Sasha Nicolle Smith is intimacy and fight director. Edward Khris Fernandez is production stage manager and Mikayla Bettner is assistant stage manager.

Please don’t ask friends who’ve seen The Engagement Party to reveal any of its dark and twisty secrets, but feel free to call them up once you’ve experienced its surprise twists and turns to compare notes. As far as this reviewer is concerned, you can beg me for details till you’re blue in the face. My lips remain sealed.

Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.
www.geffenplayhouse.com

–Steven Stanley
October 13, 2023
Photos: Jeff Lorch

Tags: Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles Theater Review, Samuel Baum