A.R. Gurney's 2017 obituary by Robert Berkvist in The New York Times put it succinctly when it described him as "a prolific playwright who dissected the fading folkways of the Northeast’s traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society, of which he himself was a member."
Center Stage at the Southampton Arts Center will provide audiences an opportunity to appraise Gurney's work this weekend with four performances of his 1981 play "The Dining Room," starting Friday at 7 p.m.
Set in a single dining room of a prosperous household, the play consists of 18 vignettes, each featuring a new set of people and events but together creating a portrait of upper-middle-class WASP life.
Some scenes are about the furniture and the characters' attachment to it. Others feature a father lecturing his son on grammar and politics; a boy returning from boarding school to discover his mother's infidelity; an elderly grandmother who doesn't recognize her sons at a holiday dinner, and a daughter who pleads unsuccessfully to return home after her marriage implodes.
The play premiered at the Studio Theatre of Playwrights Horizons in 1981. In his review of that production in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, "In each scene we meet the members and servants of a different WASP family, as they gather together for holidays, birthdays or dinner parties, or fall apart by dint of arguments, infidelities, deaths or changing mores."
He went on to say Gurney shared John Cheever's "compassion and ability to create individual characters within a milieu that might otherwise seem as homogenous as white bread."
The Center Stage production is directed by Michael Disher, with stage management and design by Joseph Giovingo and lighting and sound by Kenneth Blessing.
The cast features Daniel Becker, Susan Cincotta, Susan Conklin, Bethany Dellapolla, Richard Gardini, Tom Gregory, Barbara Jo Howard, Jenifer Maxson, Franco Pistritto, Jack Seabury, Michaal Lyn Schepps, Christopher Tyrrko, and Gerri Wilson.
Additional performances will happen on Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20, $15 for members.
Dinner and brunch specials are being offered to ticket holders by the Publick House, Claude's restaurant at the Southampton Inn, and Bamboo. Details are on the arts center's website.
