Island Players in The Dining Room
Island Players in The Dining Room
The Dining Room by A.R. Gurney will be presented by Island Players on Labor Day Weekend, Saturday, Sunday September 3 and 4 at the TPAC.
Rehearsals are well under way at Bethel Memorial Hall, with a 9-member cast: Carol Amadio, Phil Green, Terry Henkel, Daryl Johnson, Hannah Johnson, Rylee Johnson, Brennan Krieger, Jeff Maiken, and Howard Scott. Including Director, Joyce Morehouse and Producer, Joan Kuhn, there is a production team as long as your arm. A tremendous amount of talent and skill are gathered to guarantee another Island Players entertaining and insightful theatre experience.
The Dining Room had its Broadway opening in 1982, earning Gurney, a prolific playwright and novelist, a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Unique in conception and staging, it calls for a minimum of 6 actors, 3 female, 3 male, who appear as 57 different characters of all ages and types in the course of the play.
The entire play takes place in a single setting – an elegant, formal dining room, beautifully appointed with high end furnishings, china, crystal, linens, and silver. The time covered is approximately the 1930s to the 1980s and captures a way of life, a culture associated with upper-class New England. Gurney’s stage drawings label the area outside the set “limbo,” suggesting a void surrounds the room, as if it were being seen in a museum years from now.
The play is full of witty commentary, some stereotyping, but it is not judgmental. It presents a range of humanity in a room that seems to symbolize all of them. One of the characters quips, “You can learn a lot about a culture from how it eats.”
Another unique characteristic of The Dining Room is that it is comprised of a series of scenes, one following or overlapping the next with no particular continuity. Characters wander on and off stage, into and out of different time periods, different ages, types, purposes without pause except for an intermission between Acts I and II.
Think what this requires of the actors! To be able to transform into new roles again and again in the space of minutes as they enter and exit scenes lasting from 2-3 to perhaps 10 minutes in length? There is no plot in the usual story-telling sense, no attempt at character development. Only one character is ever on stage more than once. The focus is on the ensemble’s transitions from scene to unrelated scene, the dining room, the pervasive constant.
Though time covered in years is about 50 decades, the play takes place in the course of one day, beginning in early morning and progressing to an evening dinner party.
One reviewer titled his piece, “A Feast for the Mind.” Another lamented the truth that “sit down dinners are almost archaic for many families.” Another noted, “A lot of houses don’t have dining rooms anymore. After this production, we might feel a bit badly about that.”
The Dining Room by A.R. Gurney, presented by Island Players, is coming to the TPAC Labor Day Weekend, September 3,4.
Advance tickets will be available starting August 20th at the Red Cup and the Rec. Center. Tickets for the performance are $12 for adults and $6 for students up through high school
The Dining Room is produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
by Charlotte Manning
