BWW Reviews: THE DINING ROOM at Playhouse On Park

Order. Decorum. Control. In A.R. Gurney's play, these are the values celebrated in the ritual of formal dinner parties of yore. We glimpse the barest beginning of one in the final, elegiac moments of his first widely successful play.

THE DINING ROOM premiered Off-Broadway in 1982--more than a quarter century ago!--and even then was a paean to a vanishing species: the upper crust WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) New Englander. Now it seems positively dated.

Structured as a series of overlapping vignettes in two acts, the piece has pace despite a running time of nearly two hours. Playwright Gurney (born in 1930 in Buffalo, educated at St. Paul's School, Williams College, and Yale) was sufficiently self-aware to critique the classist, sexist, rigid mores of hyper-traditional families from that class a friend of mine calls the 'frozen chosen.' The six actors (three male, three female) get a workout, playing more than 50 characters amongst them: emotionally remote fathers, sexually frustrated and manipulative mothers, children who are bewildered, betrayed, and sometimes bratty.

Such scenes alternate with more nostalgic or rueful ones where the tides of change are clear. A man can't stand to see his wife put her typewriter on the dining table as she pursues a graduate degree. Household help--cooks, maids, nannies--take off to create lives that are not so subservient. Adult siblings have to split up the furnishings now that Mom has relocated to Florida. A trio of sons sings to their mother, attempting to hold her in the now, as she disappears into dementia. In 1982, this was a braver piece than it is today: it references sexual orientations that aren't heteronormative. This production sends up the resulting semi-hysterical reactions as clearly laughable.

One of the scenes that still works has an Amherst anthropology student interviewing his grandmother while she sets the table. She kicks him out once she gets that what he's doing with his camera and note-taking is researching the eating habits of her tribe, not learning how to deploy the crystal and cutlery properly.

Director Sasha Brätt moves his ensemble of six actors through the space with fluid grace, and manages the many transitions with speed. The ensemble of six actors gets good costuming help for their shape shifting from DeMara Cabrera. The table and chairs are, perhaps, a little less elegantly upscale than the class references that abound in the script. To my eye, the actor who morphs most convincingly through multiple roles and ages is Susan Haefner. She's directed before at this small theater, which is a hybrid of a neighborhood playhouse and professional venue. Sean Harris, one of the founders and co-artistic directors of Playhouse on Park, also acts in the multi-age company. They are joined by four actors making their debuts at PoP: Ezra Barnes, Annie Grier, Susan Slotoroff, and Jay William Thomas.

THE DINING ROOM runs through March 8 in West Hartford, where no seat is more than four rows from the stage. You'll be up close to the nostalgia. You may leave, as I did, with the sense that we are well rid of these elaborately codified spaces, despite the fact that we still grapple with the relational conundrums they attempted to 'civilize.'

Photo credit: Rich Wagner

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