From the Director

Dear Friends,

Welcome to A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room.

Stella Adler, an inspiring actor and teacher had this to say about theatre, “The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life . . . a spiritual and social X-ray of its time”. I find this very true for this play. Gurney has given us the setting of a single dining room to serve as a kind of twilight zone for specific situations that are quite familiar to many of us. Though this play is set in a wealthy economic stratum, the situations are universal—often quite funny and very moving. A play primarily about relationships— the beginning of a new one, the disintegration of an old one, and some that are in between. While the dining room fades in its importance, much of what the room is used for comes under scrutiny for its continued relevance in a time and society that is becoming all about what is convenient, fast, and technologically driven. As the dining room fades, so does the civility and grace inherent to the traditions of that room. For some those traditions are suffocating, burdened with expectation. The Dining Room, a play that asks us to inspect what lies beneath serves for catharsis—one of the reasons the Greeks treasured theatre so much. In coming to see, we find truth, and in finding truth, we are confronted, comforted, and eventually healed.

Thank you again for joining us.