It’s the ultimate actor’s showcase happening on Theatre Palisades’ stage with the opening of A.R. Gurney’s ‘The Dining Room.’ An ensemble cast of four women and three men heroically create 47 distinct characters who whirl in and out of action on a single set’a dining room’that represents a host of dining rooms belonging over time to a host of different people. ”The series of vignettes ranges from the comic to the serious, all in the service of skewering that easy, well-worn target: the upper-middle-class WASP. Playwright Gurney, who went on to create such hits as ‘The Cocktail Hour’ and ‘Love Letters,’ wrote ‘The Dining Room’ in 1982, the first play to bring him recognition. Born in 1930 to a well-to-do Buffalo family, Gurney drew upon a world he knows well. ”In an interview a year after the play opened, he commented: ‘The people I write about are not as threatening as they once were. They’re now perceived as another ethnic group. They’re no longer thought to hold the keys to the kingdom.’ ”Indeed, Gurney’s venture into John Cheever’s territory is at times an almost sympathetic look at a vanishing breed. A formal family dinner with a high and mighty father preaching to his children about the virtues of sitting up straight and using proper grammar is juxtaposed with a scene, intended to be several decades later, in which a real estate agent tells his prospective buyer that the two previous owners used the dining room ‘only to sort laundry.’ One can’t help but think that the playwright is reminding us that something truly has been lost with the dissolution of the traditional family dinner. ”In another sketch, an architect proposes to a client dispensing with the dining room table altogether (this, of course, coincides with the emergence of the infamous ‘Great Room’ in the ’80s). ”In between, the dining room table plays host to teenage girls raiding the liquor cabinet, a son catching his mother in a morning tryst (‘Is this what they teach you at Deerfield?’ the mother exclaims when stunned by her son’s surprise visit from boarding school) and a despondent woman, newly separated from her husband, pleading with her father’a man fixated on his ritual cocktail, preferably served in his favorite peacock glass’to allow her to live at home with her children for a time. In yet another setting, we learn Uncle Henry has been insulted at the Club, by no other than Binky Beyers (the insinuation, hardly a gasp today, surely not much of one in the ’80s, is of being gay). It’s all a rollicking, muliti-generational journey, following an ‘if these walls could talk’ premise. ”The cast’Tina Arning-Brazell, Lara Doucette, Matthew Iott, Phillip Kelly, Ivy Khan, Steve Larkin and Pamela Murphy’works overtime, tackling each new role (and there are many!) with an astonishing freshness and verve. Arning-Brazell stands out whenever she appears, displaying an incredible range from a convincingly precocious child at a birthday party to an unsteady Alsheimers-afflicted grandmother. Of special note, too, is Steve Larkin, whose winning portrayals include a controlling patriarch comically communicating the detailed plans of his own funeral to his son. ”While the sketches are engaging, at turns both funny and poignant, I’m not sure the sum of the parts reaches any revelatory whole. But maybe that’s the point when trying to make sense of family traditions and tensions among WASPS’or among any group, for that matter. ”Directed by Michael Macready and produced by Cindy Dellinger, ‘The Dining Room’ continues at Theatre Palisades, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd., through February 6. Performances are Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. The box office is open 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. Contact: 454-1970.
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