The cast of ‘The Dining Room’ gathers around a table onstage at King’s College. The A.R. Gurney play will be presented Sept. 30 through Oct. 2.
King’s College photo
A.R. Gurney play to run Sept. 30 to Oct. 3
What kind of scenes can play out in a dining room?
Perhaps a strict father will correct his daughter’s grammar, hint that his son should pull out a chair for his mum and complain to the maid about a seed in yesterday’s orange juice.
Maybe an outraged brother will declare he’s heading down to the club where his brother’s manhood was impugned — to demand an apology and fight if necessary.
Maybe a pair of siblings will quarrel over who gets what, now that their mother has down-sized and moved.
And a woman, taking her first look at the underside of the old dining room table, just might decide she can repair it herself.
Those are four of some 18 vignettes you’ll see if you attend the King’s College Theatre Department’s opening production of the academic year, A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room.”
It’s the first show the student thespians will present for a live audience since February 2020’s pre-pandemic production of “King Lear,” and cast members are excited.
“The last year has been very rough for everyone,” said Ben Smith of Glen Lyon, one of 11 actors who portray close to 60 characters representing different households and eras. “With isolation and loneliness, loss of jobs, loss of connections, the whole public health crisis has affected all of us. So we’re hoping people can come here and have a laugh, have a good cry, take it all in.”
All sorts of emotions come through in the various scenes, which take place during a time span from the 1930s to the present.
There’s sadness, for example, during one vignette in which a woman’s adult children realize she doesn’t recognize them during a holiday dinner.
“To forget who you are is one of the worst things,” said John Barrera, a theater major from Ventura, Calif., who portrays one of the sons. “The one person who can hold everyone together is fading away.”
Then you might laugh at the antics of two young women who enter the dining room in search of alcohol, said Kayleigh Bergold, of Wilkes-Barre, who plays “the weird girl who tags along with the popular girl.”
And the melodrama of the man who wants to defend his brother’s honor at the club might remind you of over-the-top 1980s sitcoms, Smith said, adding, “A man is trying to defend his family in the silliest way possible, but he’s doing it from a place of love.”
“Every vignette has meaning beyond the obvious,” Bergold said.
An underlying theme of the show is that a way of life — the culture of upperclass White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs — has faded over the decades, just as the dining room has faded.
One scene even shows a psychiatrist, who has just bought the building that contains the dining room, arguing with an architect over whether the room should be scrapped.
“The architect wants to tear it up,” Brandon Littzi of Harding said, explaining that character shares unpleasant childhood memories of hoping for the escape of being excused from the table.
“Every person in the audience will be able to relate to at least one of the characters,” director Jahmeel Powers said. “They’ll think ‘that’s something I lived through,’ or ‘someone I know lived through that’ or ‘that character reminds me of my grandfather …’ “
As the dining room and society evolve through the decades, Powers said, the audience will see many different definitions of family — close families, families at odds, family members ostracized and even “family and friends forging relationships under the table.”
They’ll also see the decline of WASP culture — “the youth of it and the death of it.”
The only character that appears more than once is a maid named Annie, who is a teenager in the earliest scene and, in the latest, “we calculated her out to be 102,” Powers said.
While the set, including a large table, remains the same throughout the show, the costumes will change for the characters from the many evolving decades.
“Our costume designer (Jennifer Raineri) did a great job representing different periods,” Powers said.
Show times are 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 through Oct. 2 with matinees at 2 p.m. Oct. 2 and Oct. 3 in the George P. Maffei Theatre inside the Mulligan building, 133 N. River St., Wilkes-Barre. The preferred way to make reservations is through brownpapertickets.com/event/5239539/.
