The Dining Room. (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

"The Dining Room," a play by the American playwright A. R. Gurney, Jr., is a comedy of manners, set in a single dining room where 18 scenes from different households overlap and intertwine. Each story is focused on a different family (during different time periods), each of which has in its possession the same dining room furniture set, manufactured in 1898. The stories are about White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) families. Some scenes are about the furniture itself and the emotional attachment to it, while other scenes simply flesh out the culture of the WASPs. Overall, it tells the story of the dying and relatively short-lived culture of upper-middle class Americans, and the transition into a much more efficient society with less emphasis on tradition and more emphasis on progress. Some characters are made fun of, as is the culture itself, but there is also a genuine longing for the sense of stability, comfort and togetherness that the culture provides.