The Dining Room by AR Gurney - Oil Lamp Theater, 1723 Glenview Road, Glenview, IL. 60025
Oil Lamp Theater Glenview, IL
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The Dining Room by AR Gurney - Oil Lamp Theater, 1723 Glenview Road, Glenview, IL. 60025
The Dining Room is a warm and poignant comedy of manners set in the dining room of a typical upscale household somewhere in the Northeastern United States. One of Gurneys most eloquent plays, it skillfully weaves together the stories of multiple generations in eighteen overlapping scenes, each offering a snapshot of a moment in time. The play considers the erosion of American upper-class traditions and values through the lens of dining rituals that play out in a homes traditional gathering place for breakfast, dinner and special occasions.
Gurney paints a compelling portrait of tradition struggling with social change against a backdrop of the universal longing for affection and comfort that binds families together. Audiences experience a full range of family situations birthday parties, holidays, breakfasts, intergenerational squabbles, extramarital affairs around the dining room table which serves as the hub of a civilized social universe that no longer holds. The series of vignettes that unfold around this table -- some touching, some hilarious, some moving all examine what it means to be a part of an American family, both past and present. The tone of this gentle comedy is at times ironic and elegiac, but it is also a joyous celebration of the people who gather together in this special place.
Executive producer and director Keith Gerth believes that The Dining Room, first produced in 1981, is even more relevant today than it was when it first opened. Were at a time in our country when some people are longing for an idealized past, a Golden Age that really never was. We hear a lot these days about going back once again to a time when the country was great. Well, to me, this play asks us to think long and hard about just what that greatness really is. The people in this play who sit around the dining room table are, in many ways, the epitome of the American success story. They seem to have everything wealth, success, social status -- but the playwright allows us see them as human, fallible, silly, and at times, as heartbreakingly sad. The world Gurney reveals to us is one in which its inhabitants have never really figured out what all their success means what greatness really is and that, I think, is something we can relate to today more than ever.
Some comments from reviewers about The Dining Room:
"an overlapping and amusing anthology of vignettes about family and food, inherited and disowned values. - New York Times
"The Dining Room serves a banquet of theatrical riches." New York Daily News
The show runs 2 hours including intermission.
Location
Oil Lamp Theater (View)
1723 Glenview Road
Glenview, IL 60025
United States
