Over the past year, Terry Hempleman has brought graceful technique and thoughtful interpretations to several area productions. He played a disintegrating cuckold in the Jungle Theater's premiere of Craig Wright's Orange Flower Water and a lovable loser in the Actors Theater of Minnesota's The Weir, and he earned high marks for his turn as Selig in the Penumbra Theatre's Joe Turner's Come and Gone. In his current role in Eye of the Storm's Dinner with Friends, Hempleman plays Gabe, an emotionally guarded food writer in his early 40s whose wife Karen serves as his editor. When Gabe and Karen's best friends get a divorce, Gabe starts to examine both the flaws of his own marriage and the superficiality of his friendships. Hempleman conveys these troubling examinations in a variety of wise and subtle ways--with a well-placed sigh, a telling glance, or a line infused with just the right amount of sarcasm. He makes his character sympathetic but doesn't gloss over his faults. In an interview with City Pages, Jungle artistic director Bain Boehlke got at some of Hempleman's gifts when he noted the actor's ear for "nuance" and "air," for the layered meanings behind words and the important silences between them.