A fine ‘Dining Room’ at Andrews Hall
A solid, stoic presence of Sonoma Arts Live’s latest production is a table. It’s a key role, the symbolic core at and around which the show’s many vignettes – comic, wry, serious, nostalgic — play out. Jaime Love, the company’s executive artistic director, knew just how to cast it. She brought her dining room table from home.
“The Dining Room” plays Andrews Hall through February 4.
The A.R. Gurney play, directed here by Joey Hoeber, is a series of vignettes. In them, six actors play dozens of characters – children and teenagers, adults and grandparents, snobby cranks and ditzy matrons. Costume changes are minimal, so establishing each personality is all about attitude and inflection.
Rhonda Guaraglia, Jill K. Wagoner, Isabelle Grimm, Tyler Hoffmann, Len Handeland, and Kit Grimm make it work. Their characters are in each moment, without much, if any, reference to prior scenes. There’s no specific timeline, only the general passage of time revealed in evocative snapshots. Only the table, quite literally in the middle of it all through the years, remains unchanged.
Gurney made a career of chronicling the decline of old-money white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. “The Dining Room” opened to off Broadway acclaim back in 1982, and his WASPs now come off as one-percenters – snobby, privileged, entitled.
They may be emotionally distant, but there is dignity and charm there. It’s an intriguing paradox.
“While Gurney pokes some fun at the culture itself, there is a genuine longing in this play for the sense of stability, comfort and togetherness that the culture provided,” says director Joey Hoeber. It’s true. You may not agree with their politics, but you wouldn’t mind having a drink on their veranda.
The casting is refreshing. Predictable choices are upended. The older actors appear as kids and teenagers; Grimm, a young woman, plays a grandmother with dementia.
It’s a welcome challenge to audiences usually served predictable stereotypes.
Sonoma Arts Live presents “The Dining Room,” through February 4, Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Rotary Stage in Andrews Hall, Sonoma Community Center, 276 E. Napa St. Tickets are $22-$37 at Sonomaartslive.org or 866.710.8942.
— Val Robichaud
Photos by Miller Oberlin
