 League Goes to the Theater
The Dining Room
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27
CURTAIN TIME - 6:30
"The Dining Room" has been called "funny, rueful and very moving" in the New York Times; "A banquet of theatrical riches" in the New York Daily News; and "Hilarious and touching" in the New York Post.
This modern comedy by A.R. Gurney Jr. comes to Honolulu after playing two years off-Broadway when the Honolulu Community Theatre presents it November 25 to December 10.
Nicholas Hormann, who played in the New York and San Francisco versions of the show, will be leading the cast for the HCT production, which will be directed by Jim Hutchison.
The Dining Room is the result of Gurney's fascination with upper middle-class WASPS. He has, on occasion, thus been compared to John Cheever or Philip Barry. The show is a series of humorously poignant vignettes on the changing role of the classic formal dining room over the course of three generations. Gurney reverses the classic American success story beloved by Broadway: "I tend to write about people who are looking over their shoulders and are not so much on the way up as on the way down," the playwright observes.
In the play, for example, a young man goes to see his great-aunt to ask her about her Waterford crystal and is particularly interest in her fingerbowls. She is delighted ---until she discovers that the young man's interest is due to an anthropology class assignment on "the eating habits of vanishing cultures." He had chosen as his subject, "The WASPS of the Northeastern United States."
Gurney, who has been teaching American literature and humanities for over 20 years at M.I.T., wrote his first play when he was in kindergarten.
(From the office of Elissa Josephsohn
Public relations, advertising, marketing)
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October 1983
December 1983
