A.R. Gurney on 'The Dining Room'

In 1981, I took a sabbatical leave from teaching literature at M.I.T. and drove down to New York with the first draft of this play on the seat beside me. I planned to sublet an apartment for myself and my wife, and spend six months living it up in the big city. On this trip, I also arranged to meet with my agent Gilbert Parker, who already had received a copy of the play. Gilbert, God love him, told me he’d have difficulty endorsing a play with no real through-line and populated with characters who were so obviously out of the current loop. Certainly the play is oddly demanding in that it asks a small number of actors to play more than fifty roles of varying ages. It is also peculiarly constructed as it focuses on many different families going through their motions in a generic dining room for over fifty years, while the various scenes occur during the course of a single day. Yet it was the very obsolescence of the world the play presents which originally had prompted me to write about it. Indeed I first envisioned it being performed behind a velvet rope as if in a museum of antiquities, with actors presenting scenes as if they were enactments illustrating a long lost culture. But my agent didn’t dig any of that stuff. I slunk out of his office, but since my wife and I had already rented our house in the Boston area , I still committed us to a sublet in Manhattan, signed up for a course on Greek at Fordham, offered my services to the Fortune Society to teach ex-prisoners how to read, and planned to spend my sabbatical in New York in non-theatrical ways.

Meanwhile, on my own, I submitted The Dining Room to Andre Bishop, the Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons whom I had met briefly before. He offered to give a reading to what he called The Dinner Party if I could dig up a director. Fortunately my friend David Trainer, a fellow playwright, thought he might like to direct the piece. The reading went well, and a sixty-seat space at Playwrights happened to be empty, so rather immediately we opened there, garnered decent reviews, moved downstairs to a larger space. Within a year, were playing not only in an open-ended run in the Astor Place Theatre in New York, but also had a second company warming up at the Kennedy Center. M.I.T. kindly granted me an “extended leave of absence”, so my wife and I stayed on in New York and our children became concerned about where to bring their laundry 

The original cast of The Dining Room in New York was composed of Lois De Banzie, John Shea, Ann McDonough,. William B. Macy, Pippa Pearthree, and Remak Ramsay. In Washington, Frances Sternhagen and Barry Nelson among others presided at the table. The play’s subsequent success in regional theatres and abroad proves once again how much luck is involved in the theatre – as there is, I imagine, in most other enterprises. During the ensuing years, Gilbert Parker was a master at marketing the play, though I’ve continued to be afraid that he was right all along, and that my collage of scenes set in a generic dining room would become as outmoded and irrelevant as the finger-bowls it pokes fun at. But tricky though it is to do the play well, it still is performed both here and in Europe, and seems to hold up. A small cast of six serves it best, but more actors may be cast - as they usually are - in amateur productions.