Review: ‘The Dining Room’ at Victory Theatre Center
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As the digital age layers on paradigm shifts, there is bittersweet pleasure in reflecting on what has passed, as in ‘The Dining Room.’
A.R. Gurney’s 1981 episodic look at declining WASP culture isn’t exactly deep-dish, yet its delicate mixture of elegy and mirth remains captivating.
‘Dining Room’ was Gurney’s breakthrough play, a Pulitzer finalist that presaged his subsequent upper-middle-class studies. The narrative depicts various 20th century families and servants in vignettes that overlap around an iconic dining room (well rendered by designer Vandy Scoates).
Despite occasional overemphasis, Gurney keeps eras and anecdotes in fluid thematic focus. A children’s birthday party conceals adulterous longings, a Christmas meal frames a portrait of senility. Modern disregard for the room’s history jockeys with Junior Assembly gibes, tippling college girls, bonds between patricians and menials, and so forth. Funny, salty and touching by turns, the accrued effect suggests floating place cards for a vanished tradition.
The fine-tuned Interact Theatre Company staging serves up the seriocomic goods, thanks to director Kay Cole’s unfussy handling of an excellent ensemble. James Greene makes a convincingly petulant, infatuated child and a poignant funeral-planning father, and Mimi Cozzens brings similar nuance to her gallery of matriarchs and progeny. Robert Briscoe Evans moves from loan-seeking grandson to cultural anthropologist to affronted blueblood with panache. Amanda Tepe portrays the senile senior as deftly as she inhabits a badly married daughter desperate to return home. This penetrating scene, perhaps ‘Dining Room’s’ best, pits Tepe against Matthew Ashford, whose sensitivity has never been used to better advantage, while Tracy Powell carries ineffable dignity beneath her tart Virginia Mayo aspect.
Effortlessly switching age and status in Scoates’ all-purpose costumes, they form a beautifully balanced unit. At one point, a character notes, ‘This room has such resonance,’ and so has this elegant revival.
— David C. Nichols
‘The Dining Room,’ Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays. Ends Feb. 15. $25. (818) 765-8732. Running time: 2 hours.