‘Dining’ out

A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room” is one crowded, crowded, dining room. This 1982 comedy-drama contains 57 characters, ranging in age from 5 to 80.

However, all 57 characters are played by only six actors. These actors must switch personas and even ages to play a series of scenes – vignettes, really – that range chronologically from the 1930s to the present.

It was Gurney’s first popular success, and went on to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

He became one of America’s most successful playwrights with “Love Letters” and “Sylvia,” to name just two of his many hits.

“But I’m not sure he wrote anything as touching as this breakthrough work,” wrote New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, in looking back at Gurney’s career.

Every scene takes place in the dining room, because that room is, essentially, what the play is about.

“ ‘Dining Room’ covers the death of the dining room in America,” said Karen Kalensky, who both directs and appears in the Interplayers production which opens the professional theater’s season tonight.

It was once the vital center of American home life, but has faded while breakfast bars and delivery pizza have become ascendant.

The play functions almost as an anthropological study of a “vanishing culture” – the affluent white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant class of the Northeast.

Rich, in his original 1982 review, described the play like this: “In each scene, we meet the members and servants of a different WASP family, as they gather together for holidays, birthdays or dinner parties, or fall apart by dint of arguments, infidelities, deaths or changing mores.”

He said Gurney demonstrates a particular gift in this play: the ability to create vivid characters with a few swift strokes.

“Though dozens of people whirl in and out of Mr. Gurney’s metaphorical dining room, they all come through … clearly and quickly,” said Rich.

In the Interplayers version, those characters will be played by an ensemble that includes Kalensky, Reed McColm, Anne Selcoe, Michael Maher, Bethany Hart and Thomas Stewart.

Los Angeles actress/director Kalensky, Interplayers’ new consulting artistic director, has directed this play before and called it “one of my favorites because it is funny and touching.”

But what about acting in it and directing it?

“I love challenges,” she said with a laugh. “It keeps me on my toes.”