Reviews
| THE DINING ROOM, TinFish Theatre.
This A.R. Gurney play could easily be described as an anthropological
study. Its 18 scenes put the dynamics of an American family on not
entirely nostalgic display. The dining room is the only constant
as six actors perform numerous characters in quick succession. Scenes
often overlap, with new characters taking over the dining room before the
last have moved on. It's a conceit that requires versatile actors
who must make immediate shifts in personality and sensibility as the play
moves swiftly from the 1930s to today.
The TinFish cast does a decent job, but too few of the 57 characters are fully |
realized. Still, there are sharp bits,
such as Jon Frazier and Mary Jo Bolduc's squabbling siblings vying for
the dining room furniture, and Martti Nelson's entertaining turn as a socialite
making decisions for her daughter. Reid Ostrowski is especially good
playing a grandfather begrudging his timid grandson money moments after
he portrayed a sniveling child. Frazier also brings our the play's
comedy as preppy Standis, off to the club to demand an apology for an insult
done to his brother. Directed by Dejan Avramovich, this dining room
is home to intimate moments both funny and poignant.
--Jenn Goddu |
| The Dining Room
Playwright: A.R. Gurney At: TinFish Theatre, 4247 N. Lincoln Ave. Phone: (773) 549-1888 Tickets: $17.50 Runs through Sept. 1 By Mary Shen Barnidge It's a solid wood table, split at the center
to accommodate an extra leaf (or maybe two). It comes with six large,
hard-seated chairs, all shipped in 1898 from a factory in Wilkes-Barre,
Penn. It's the sort of furniture about which people say, "They don't
make it like that any more." Indeed, this is said several times during
the course of A.R. Gurney's social history of 20th-century American as
revealed by its rituals conducted within the sanctuary surrounding this
icon
|
unexpectedly to discover his mother in an illicit affair,
and two teenage academy-girls make an unsupervised raid on their parent's
liquor cabinet. An aged father reviews his funeral arrangements,
a family Thanksgiving dinner is disrupted by the clan dowager's wavering
memory, while another supper is aborted as Daddy rushes off to avenge an
insult to the sibling whose "bachelor acquaintances" have aroused comment
among their club fellows. ("Is Uncle Henry a fruit?" asks one of
the children, adroitly dispensing with euphemisms.)
This milieu is identified as "the WASPs of Northern New England" by the nephew who outrages his aunt with ridicule of her antiquated lifestyle, but Gurney's documentation is not restricted to that privileged segment of the population. If the arc of the individual scenes grow somewhat repetitive after a time...children defy the status quo while their parents defend it (albeit sometimes abandoning white-collar jobs to pursue hobbies full-time, as with the stockbroker-turned-carpenter who bonds with a freshly divorced matron over the restoration of that same venerable table)...it is in part due to the capable ensemble work of the six actors assembled for this TinFish theatre production, whose protean rendering of their disparate characters...57 in all...allows us to find the universality in Gurney's insights into our country's progress from Elitism to Egalitarianism. |
| Dining Room
A.R. Gurney's "Dining Room" might as will be called, "if these Dining Room Walls Could Talk" - a montage of stories about the lives, loves and attitudes of well-to-do WASP families in New England between 1940 and 1980. The dining room table itself unifies the vignettes, which overlap one another the same way dreams shift form story to story. It's a good concept, but the play itself had a dated feel; in most American middle-class homes today, the dining room is a place for sorting laundry and stacking mail, not where compelling human drama is played out. The TinFish production smartly keeps the costume and set changes simple and minimal, but downplays the passage of time, leaving many sketches isolated and without context to an evolving sense of family and cultural norms. However, the ensemble cast parcels out some real gems. Mary Jo Bolduc steals just about every scene she's in; Jon Frazier is hilarious as the little boy at a birthday party who can't stop rubbing the crotch of his pants; while Lisa Stran and Stephen Shaw share a quietly magnetic moment as a divorcee and a shy carpenter examining the underside of a wobbly table. (Nina Metz) |
Warm and familiar family vignettes fill
'Dining Room'
|
with stops for many possibilities in between. With
only the slightest of costume changes, they easily shift identities to
assume a dazzling diversity: children, parents, grandparents, friends and
household help.
The play's greatest strength - the skill with which the characters are revealed - is also its greatest weakness. The characters are so interesting that we want to know more about them, to see them more continuously in an integrated play, perhaps one more like Thornton Wilder's "The Long Christmas Dinner" where consecutive generations of one family come to the table, age and leave the same dinner table. Here we have 18 distinct, separate stories. Three adult sons burst into song during Thanksgiving dinner to jog the memory of their senile mother. Fractious children at a birthday party are unaware of the innuendoes in the ending affair between the mother of one child and the father of another. An architect tries to badger a psychiatrist into dividing the dining room to make space for his office and gets analysed in turn when his motivations become suspect. The dialogue is fast paced and to the point. Gurney gently pokes fun at the issues and concerns of his bourgeois world. "You want to leave the nest and take a piece of the nest egg with you," a grandfather accuses his offspring. Gurney has said that he wrote and rewrote portions of dialogue and plot the nights his family attended performances, fearing they'd recognize themselves and be upset. The result's a comedy in which we may all recognize our selves and our families - with warmth, appreciation, and new insight. |
| It is probably the most maligned piece of
furniture in the house. Virtually ignored these days and subjected
to the indignities of folded laundry, scattered homework and a repository
for junk mail, the dining room stands as a testament to family time of
days long gone by. As one of the characters in A.R. Gurney's "The
Dining Room" observes, "it just sits there, it's never used." But
the dining room aslo bore witness to friendly gatherings, festive celebrations
and family squabbles, and gurney's bittersweet chronicle of half a century
of such occurrences is gracefully witty, a bit sentimentla and quietly
revealing.
This isn't the sort of fare one expects to see at TinFish Theatre, which specializes in more obscure and adventurous European literature. And the lack of a backstage and limited stage space still make for an awkward playing area. But director Dejan Avramovich has wisely kept the stage clean and simple, and set desinger Jon Frazier (who doubles as a cast member) provides a dining room that is quietly elegant in its economy. The centerpiece, the lovely antique dining toom table, is a character unto itself, silently witnessing the evolution and dismantling of a culture. |
The 6-member cast (Reid Ostrowski, Stephen
Shaw, Jon Frazier, Lisa Stran, Martii Neslon and Mary Jo Bolduc) are called
on to play 57 roles in 18 scenes or vignettes. Witness their versatility
as Ostrowski goes from a bratty child to a crotchety grandfather in the
very next scene with little more than a prop cane, and Stran and Nelson
switch roles as a walthy matron and her maid in one scene and mother and
daughter in another.
Perhaps the most memorable scene involves a woman happily demonstrating the fine art of polishing silverware and setting the table for her grandson until she learns that she is to be the subject of an anthropology lecture on "the eating habits of vanishing cultures." Beaming with the tenacity of Martha Stewart's gracious living one moment, she recoils in heated indignation. Also compelling is a woman with children pleading with her aged father for a safe haven, and an elderly man planning the minutiae of his own funeral. A.R. Gurney's rich chronicle of the experience of the white upper-class WASP's is occasionally poignant and sparklingly funny. |