Decline of the Wasp

By T.E. Kalem

THE DINING ROOM by A.R. Gurney Jr.

Almost never does a U.S. playwright deal with bloodlines, class lines and cultural totems and taboos. That is what makes A.R. Gurney Jr.'s drama something of a novelty. It is not a play, properly speaking, but a series of vignettes, almost like revue sketches, set in Northeastern Wasp territory, where the inhabitants go to Ivy League schools, often possess inherited wealth and hold their opinions in their obdurate spines.

The Dining Room might be subtitled The Decline of the Wasp, except that it is clear-eyed, touching and buoyantly funny. The stage set itself is something of an anachronism with its Sheraton table, Hepplewhite chairs and dour ancestral portraits. The time span is from the Depression to the present. The dining room used to be the site of unalterable tribal rites--Thanksgiving, Christmas, family fiscal confabulations. Now people eat in the kitchen.

Gurney uses the room as a kind of revolving door for life's large and little ironies. Through it troop generations of disparate families as well as a feudal array of maids much given to the response "Yes, Missus." In the first episode, a brother and sister who have inherited the house argue testily about which of them is to have the dining room. Subsequently, an architect advises a psychiatrist purchaser of the house to split the room up into his office and a reception area.

Two teen-age schoolgirls violate the sanctity of the room and go AWOL from their parents' code by valiantly swigging a blend of gin, vodka and Fresca. In a duel of social proprieties, a daughter defies her mother's edict that she attend a dance that will enhance her status in the Junior League and opts to attend a performance of Saint Joan with her spinster aunt. Still later, as an Amherst student photographs his aunt's chinaware in the room, he tells her that he is doing an anthropology paper on "the eating habits of vanishing cultures" and that her crystal finger bowls symbolize "a neurotic obsession with cleanliness associated with the guilt of the last stages of capitalism."

In a six-person cast that is admirably flexible, Remak Ramsay is outstanding. He combines a ramrod to-the-manor-born stance with a tissue-thin vulnerability. This holds true through a variety of roles: a small boy who is devastated when a maid (his surrogate mother) tells him that she is leaving to start a family of her own; a middle-aged man painfully humiliated by his teen-age son's awareness of his liaison with his best friend's wife; an old man meticulously detailing his own funeral arrangements to his son while soliciting some final word or gesture of love from him.

Perhaps Ramsay is most formidable as a conservative autocrat of the breakfast table who tells his young son that the government is ruining the country. The boy replies that his teacher says the government should help people in Depression times. Fuming in anger, the father deliberately makes the boy late for school. Ramsay seems to embody the Wasps as Gurney critically and compassionately sees them--a breed whose manners calcified into morals while the society around them abandoned morality.

--By T.E. Kalem

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