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Published on 5/17/08
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It’s hard out here for a WASP. Daddy can’t even come in from the golf course for little sis’s birthday party. Mumsy’s so suspicious of the girls drinking her gin that the kids have to add water to the bottle after they’ve stolen some. And gramp is certainly being stodgy about coughing up junior’s Latin school tuition, isn’t he? In his tart series of vignettes that take place around various dining-room tables of entitlement, playwright Gurney does all he’s ever done: wistfully document the decaying, mannered lives of the gentry, those who mistakenly keep secrets and money close to the vest but loved ones at pin-striped sleeve’s length. (On the scale of exasperated privilege, Gurney ranks one notch over a Cheever.)
Nevertheless, director Hutchinson’s highly seductive in-the-round production is crisply alert and flushed. Her bright actors, several of them relative newcomers, are all asked to play more than two decades on either side of their true ages, yet Hutchinson rarely lets them look foolish. In particular, astringent Marsha Harman offers multiple flavors and maximum precision as several flustered matrons.
Instead of a standout actor, New Leaf seems to have selected The Dining Room to showcase its two most rarefied assets: its queerly elegant found space—as intimate as a discreet aside from Mrs. Astor—and its invaluable resident sound designer. As the cast pantomimes all the props to Nick Keenan’s recorded, carefully placed effects of delicate papers being rustled or rattling flatware getting polished, you suspect the designer knows even better than the playwright the sound of a WASP’s nest.
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