The Dining Room

Clurman Theater
Theater Row

The Dining Room is a series of vignettes of small landmark family events in dining rooms. The play is set in a single dining room, meant to represent many. Primarily, it does not represent a middle-class dining room, which I think I saw in a write-up, but all of the vignettes are variations on the WASP family. Most of the vignettes had maids, cooks, or the like.

The playwright's definition of the dining room is that it is a place of landmark family moments. The reason it is a place for landmark family moments is because it serves as sacred space in a house. The best of everything ends up in the dining room and a family can be defined in how they relate to the sacred space. In general, people have expectations of "the special" from this particular room.

Many of the vignettes address childhood memories. They deal with transitional events like being old enough to eat at the table with the adults or important rebellions that took place in the space. The adult characters were often saying goodbye or reminiscing in the room. There is a general movement in the play where young families transition into older families with older children as the evening goes on. Later in the play, children are teens, then college children, and then finally adult children with children of their own.

One of the refreshing parts of the play is that the actors were generally not typecast according to age. There were two older actors and they often played the child to a younger actor's role of parent.

The play opens with a real estate broker showing the room to a client. The client will only be in the area temporarily and doesn't need anything quite so grand. He realizes that he brings hope and expectation to such a room, hope that won't be realized. So, he will continue his search for another place, knowing that everything he sees after this will fall short, but be more realistic.

Certain vignettes come to mind when I think of the play. There is a delightful (and funny) children's birthday party about half way through. No attention is paid to the damage they could do to the room because the focus is on the parent of the birthday child ending an affair with another child's parent.

At the end of the play a father explains to his son the exact arrangements for his funeral. For me, it was one of the more moving bits. The words were just right, the acting was good and it captured a difficult moment.

The last scene showcases what in my mind would be the perfect family dinner party. People come in, they are happy to see one another, they are civil, and they toast one another. It's the hope of such a room that people would be so happy in it. All of the other vignettes showcased memories of growing up and memories of the room, while this one seemed to truly showcase the hope in owning a dining room--a hope for lovely memories and lovely meals with exalted, special objects in sacred space. I found that my experiences in my family's dining room came into play here as I had a reaction of my own to what was taking place on the stage.

In short, if you had a dining room growing up or if you have one now--your hopes, dreams and maybe even your reality might be reflected in the play at some point.

The set was quite nice. It looked natural and real enough for the action that took place there. The costumes were absolutely dreadful. Each character got one costume, all in shades of blue and teal. They were sort of the color of a faded photograph. That's the only analogy that I came up with that might explain their awfulness. However, they really were awful. The men were wearing an odd color blue shoe, which was distracting at first. In fact, there was something distracting about all of the costumes.

The acting was beyond decent, falling short of absolutely extraordinary. It's a difficult show, playing so many characters at breakneck speed. I think I read that it opened with William H. Macy in one of the roles. So, this needed great character actors. It had good acting.

My advice, don't avoid it but it's not a must-see. It's entertaining enough. It's also different in ways from much that is out there, so in that sense it is refreshing.