The Westport Country Playhouse’s opening of A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room takes the audience through a journey of, as the play puts it, the “dying culture,” of the WASPs. The play is quite an appropriate season opener for the Playhouse as Fairfield County knows the WASP, or more fully White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, lifestyle better than most.
The play defies a more traditional narrative structure with its overlapping scenes and the myriad of characters played by each of the six actors. While this approach is surprising at first, the form is ultimately perfect for illustrating what the WASP culture is and was and how it has changed. Each scene peeks into a facet of the culture: maintaining the honor of the family, infidelity and learning the rules of society, to name a few. Some of these themes were deeply explored in the scenes showing the resentment of WASP children as they grew up and the interaction with the domestic servants who supported the whole institution. It is in these scenes, when a common thread dominates, that the audience cannot help but wonder if the same family is being depicted in different times and generations. Yet as the momentum of the play builds, it becomes clear that trying to define this play in terms of a single family, experience, or narrative is limiting. The power of The Dining Room is its skillful ability to illustrate a culture in a way that is both profoundly personal and broadly cultural.
The Playhouse’s performance thrives under Mark Lamos’ direction. While the actors are clearly more comfortable portraying certain ages than others, they nevertheless slip adeptly between characters and scene changes. Their range, which encompasses patriarchs to exuberant toddlers to doddering old women, builds a fully-fleshed world for the audience to live in.
The whole enterprise is underscored by a set that is, of course, dominated by the dining room table. The table stands as a constant reminder that this room serves a very specific purpose. Yet as it is inhabited in a number of different circumstances, it becomes clear that fine dining rooms of the northeast came to take on a meaning in life far greater than the fancy dinner parties they were built for. The washed out white-blue color of the set is invigorated by lively scenes while at the same time hinting at the fading glory of the WASP empire.
The Westport Country Playhouse’s showing of The Dining Room is a humorous and poignant look at a culture that is often talked about and rarely so sensitively explored. The play opens the 2013 Playhouse season on high-note and is hopefully a predictor of the quality of the plays to come.
