One 'Dining Room' packed with 57 characters

"We're studying the eating habits of various vanishing cultures, like the WASPs of the Northeastern United States," claims a straight-faced Tony (Emlen Smith, SY '03), a student at Amherst College. Though most of us are more inclined to picture Native American or Aborigine tribesmen when we think of `vanishing cultures,' The Dining Room insists that dying traditions lie much closer to home then we'd like to admit. Right in our own houses, in fact, where the distractions of modernity have deprived us of the stability and simplicity of bygone days.

DAVID GEST/YH Martha Stewart may weep at the style, but we weep at the memories. And Grandma's casserole.

The Dining Room, written by A.R. Gurney and directed by Colette Robert, DC '03, is composed of 18 distinct scenes occurring over a span of 50 years, in which six actors play 57 different roles. In order to create continuity from the separate lives of the overwhelming number of characters, Gurney seamlessly blends scenes together, occasionally leaving one of the characters from the concluding scene onstage as the next begins. The liaison character continues to perform the same actions during the transition between scenes, while simultaneously changing personas. Thus the individual stories merge into a single saga of family tensions, regrets, illicit relationships, and uncertain futures.

Gurney's dialogue creates remarkably detailed, textured portraits of each of the 57 characters in The Dining Room. He conjures rounded, believable figures with a minimum of words and action. The six actors in the production bring the script vividly to life with gestures, glances, and intonations that convey the nuances of their characters' personalities and emotions. They shift identities with apparent ease, transitioning convincingly from young, petulant children to senile, marginalized grandparents in mere minutes.

Although all of the actors show notable range, Fran Kranz, MC '04, steals the spotlight with his charisma and versatility. He appears first as a wealthy, self-important father doling out didactic wisdom to his hesitant son, then subsequently adopts the personas of a retarded child and an alcoholic father, among other characters. In his most memorable role, Kranz seems to age before our eyes, becoming an old man by furrowing his brow, absently scratching his face, fluttering his hands, pursing his lips, and punctuating his gravelly speech with the pauses and `ums' of senility. In accordance with the play's primary theme, his character states, "The first thing you do is simplify things." He recognizes that life has become too complex, and younger generations have forgotten how to live.

In contrast to the complexity of the production's cast and message, its set is nearly bare: a dining room table surrounded by six chairs sits center stage, with a hanging window frame at either side of the stage front. Although the room actually represents many different dining rooms in many different houses, each looks identical because the dining room, according to Gurney, holds a unique place in our culture as a universal symbol of tradition, family unity, and stability. The production as a whole mourns the disintegration of family and place through portraying the physical decay of the home's center, the dining room. In one of the most memorable scenes in the play, Rachel Grand, BR '02, plays a woman whose dining room furniture "is coming unglued, coming apart at the seams," according to the cabinet-maker (Bradley Bazzle, CC '02) that she hires to repair her wobbly table and chairs. As the furniture crumbles, so do society's foundations: children move away from their families, vital traditions die, and the home's disappears.

Theater

The Dining Room By A.R. Gurney Directed by Colette Robert Fri., Nov. 10 at 7 and 10 p.m. Sat., Nov. 11 at 8 p.m. Calhoun Cabaret

The dining room is no longer a sacred place, and the characters we meet become increasingly lost and ungrounded in successive scenes. As it moves through the years from the simplicity of lost decades to the frenzy of the fractured present, The Dining Room is at turns poignant and satirical, whimsical and nostalgic. The opening of each act lends the production a wistful tinge, as Justin Chen, SM '03, serenades an empty stage on his violin. In the modern world the play evokes, the characters have lost track of the substance of their lives; the notes of the violin effectively symbolize the beauty that constantly surrounds them all, only perceivable to the oldest.

In its final scene, The Dining Room leaves the audience with a glimpse of the ideal but vanishing world of decades past. Grand stands at the front of the stage, raptly describing her dream of the perfect dinner party, as the rest of the cast members file onto the stage and act out her vision. In her dream we see the harmony, simplicity, and completeness of the nuclear family eras. However, as The Dining Room suggests, these days only live on in dreams. We've been cast adrift; without the metaphorical dining room at the center of our lives, few of us know exactly who we are.

Back to A&E...