The Dining Room

From the back of the playbook: The play is set in the dining room of a typical well-to-do household, the place where the family assembled daily for breakfast and dinner and for any and all special occasions.

The actors change roles, personalities and ages with virtuoso skill as they portray a wide variety of characters, from little boys to stern grandfathers, and from giggling teenage girls to Irish housemaids.

Mel Gussow, in The New York Times, wrote that the play is "an overlapping and amusing anthology of vignettes about family and food, inherited and disowned values.

"[11] Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times: "...a series of vignettes that charts the WASP's decline and fall since the depression, has the ruefulness of a collection of John Cheever stories....Both works ['The Middle Ages'] have received fine productions.

"[12] The New York Times reviewer (of the Westport production) noted that this is one of Gurney's "most eloquent plays, writing "the 50 or so people who sit at this dining table over the decades belong to the socioethnic group known, sometimes disparagingly and sometimes enviously, as WASPs.