The Dining Room

The dining room.  Does anyone even use a dining room anymore?  Doesn’t everyone want a Joanna Gaines open concept home? A Classic Theatre’s first play of the season, The Dining Room by A. R. Gurney, tackles that question by using that room, and its declining importance, to comment on how American society has changed for better and worse. The result is hilarious and touching.

The Dining Room skips back and forth over the decades of the 20th century. We see the dining room go from hallowed ground to a pointless waste of space. Characters keep trying to break it up or repurpose it.  While Gurney uses upper-crust WASP families to showcase this, the now neglected room which was once a vital center of family life is universal to all cultures and social strata in the US.

A Classic Theatre invites you to join them in seeing the actors change roles, personalities, and ages as they portray a wide variety of characters, from little boys to stern grandfathers, and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids.