Gaslight Dinner Theatre presents The Dining Room in the round

Release Date: 4/22/2004. Expired: 5/22/2004

With its presentation of A.R. Gurney’s classic American play The Dining Room, the Gaslight Dinner Theatre at The Renaissance Center unveils its first production “in the round” as the audience will surround the stage.

“The Dining Room is perfectly designed for staging with the audience all the way around the set and this will be our first opportunity to take advantage of the round design of the theatre itself,” said Pacer Harp, managing director of the Gaslight Dinner Theatre. “All of our previous productions maintained the traditional staging of the audience on one side of the theatre facing the actors on the other. But in The Dining Room, all of the play takes place at and around a dining room table, thereby allowing us to present the play right in the middle of the audience.”

The Gaslight Dinner Theatre presents The Dining Room Fridays and Saturdays, May 7-22. Evening shows begin with dinner at 6:30 p.m. Senior Matinee performances are presented at 12 p.m. on Fridays. Tickets for evening performances are $27 per person while Senior Matinees for patrons 55 and older sold out in less than one day. The price includes a buffet meal, dessert and the performance.

Directed by Hal Partlow, managing director of the Renaissance Repertory Theatre Company, The Dining Room presents a series of glimpses into the human condition: the joys, sorrows, love and sadness that accompany family life. The play visits a host of characters as they go about their daily business, all around a dining room table. Each of the 18 vignettes, which range from the comic to the serious, explores the dynamic relationships of families.

“Rather than the scenery changing around the characters, this play is unique in that the characters change around the scenery,” Partlow said. “The ensemble of three men and three women creates 57 characters in total as the action swirls in and out of various dining rooms belonging to the vanishing upper-middle class WASPs, who are the subjects of many of Gurney’s works.”

Gurney, one of the most prolific and produced playwrights in America, has earned his reputation as the “WASP writer” because many of his plays reveal and gently poke fun at the issues, concerns and fall of the vanishing class of Americans, of which his own family was a part.

“The people I write about are not as threatening as they once were,” Gurney said. “They’re now perceived as another ethnic group. They’re no longer thought to hold the keys to the kingdom.”

The Dining Room, first produced in 1982, will be the third play by Gurney presented by the Gaslight Dinner Theatre, having produced Sylvia and Love Letters in the 2002-03 season.

In the June 1982 issue of Showbill, Gurney explained the origins of The Dining Room.

“I soon found myself writing this strange play that kept wanting to take place in a dining room,” he said. “This was the room where my parents used to give their sparkling dinner parties, the laughter from which I could hear echoing up the stairs long after I had shaken hands and been sent to bed. Yet just as I used to squirm in my seat at the strictures of the dining room, so did my rebelliousness assert itself against these rules of drama. I’ve never had confrontations with my family. Writing is my source of psychological healing.”

Although his playwriting has had a therapeutic effect on Gurney himself, it strained real-life relations with his father and other members of his family as they recognized themselves in his characters and plot lines. In fact, he had dramatized such familial events as his grandfather’s funeral and his grandmother’s senile delusions. Subsequently, Gurney was known to re-write portions of dialogue and plot on the nights family members attended performances.

But writing from his true-life experiences makes his characters and stories more true-to-life as audiences find themselves and people they know in the characters, situations and settings.

“The Dining Room slips seamlessly from one family to another as each scene takes the audience in a different direction, from tears to giggles, from anger to sympathy,” Partlow said. “Just about all of us grew up with a ‘dining room,’ a place in our homes that was central to family activities. It is the place where we shared our joys, experienced discipline, comforted in times of sorrow and just lived out the bond of being a family.”

The Gaslight Dinner Theatre’s production of The Dining Room also will feature an original score created by Elaine Sherrill, senior director of Music at The Renaissance Center.

Reservations can be made by calling (615)740-5570. For more information on this and other Gaslight Dinner Theatre productions, call (615)740-5600.

The Renaissance Center is an arts and technology education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.

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