Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dining table at centerstage during A.R. Gurney's The Dining Room is not merely a piece of furniture to be admired, loathed, typed upon, repaired, eaten upon. It's an emblem of that vanishing privileged breed indigenous to the Northeast that is the focus of Gurney's work: the WASP...
...play consists of a series of overlapping vignettes, each of which takes place in a different dining room with a new set of WASP inhabitants. In smooth succession, Gurney presents all sorts of table settings: a kindergarten birthday bash complete with ice cream, a tense mother-daughter talk, and a pitch to granddad for prep school tuition money made by a politic young man, to name...
...Dining Room's versatile and polished cast of four women and four men take on a total of more than 50 characters. Each actor covers his share of WASP territory--each one seems to play a cute, babbling brat at least once, and there are enough overbearing octogenarians and strait-laced domestics to give everyone a chance to age. Director Onbargi and his cast never allow the quick switches to render the evening's entertainment a mere collection of acting exercises. Aside from its location in the Ex, there's nothing experimental about this Dining Room...
Holly Cate is impressive in the role of manipulative mother, warning her less-confident daughter (Rebecca Clark) against missing the first meeting of the Junior Assemblies. "Once you miss," she coldly scolds, "you never catch up." Cate also manages well in one of the play's few non-WASP roles. As a teenaged friend of Sarah (Caroline Bicks), she proclaims the dining room "wicked nice...
...traditional adversary relationship to power and, instead, parade an anarchic childishness. Their banner might have read HELL, NO, WE WON'T GROW UP. In Britain, Monty Python's Flying Circus tossed music-hall bawdry into a Dada format, and at home National Lampoon updated sick humor with a stinging Wasp edge. They were vicious; they were silly; they couldn't care less. And now someone had to shatter the lulling cadences of stand-up too. Who better than the child of Disneyland and Wittgenstein...