The Dining Room
By A.R. Gurney

THE STORY: The play is set in the dining room of a typical well-to-do household, the place where the family assembled daily for breakfast and dinner and for any and all special occasions. The action is comprised of a mosaic of interrelated scenes – some funny, some touching, some rueful – which, taken together, create an in-depth portrait of a vanishing species: The upper-middle-class WASP.

The actors change roles, personalities and ages with virtuoso skill as they portray a wide variety of characters, from little boys to stern grandfathers, and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids.

Each vignette introduces a new set of people and events; a father lectures his son on grammar and politics; a boy returns from boarding school to discover his mother’s infidelity; a senile grandmother doesn’t recognize her own sons at Christmas dinner; a daughter, her marriage in shambles, pleads futilely to return home, etc.

Dovetailing swiftly and smoothly, the varied scenes coale