‘Dining Room’ in no need of remodeling

The cast of the 25th anniversary of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room,” which enters previews Tuesday at the Harold Clurman Theater.

By Jerry Tallmer

It is like a string of pearls, or what you glimpse from one subway train when it is being passed by another — scene, scene, scene, scene, each scene, each vignette conveying a moment, a life, a relationship, a crisis, a stasis, an attitude, an essence, a turning point, all in this one big old honorable dining room that is many dining rooms before the play is out.

A real-estate agent showing that noble room to a potential home-buyer. (“You shouldn’t have shown me this first. You’ve spoiled everything else.”)

A brother and sister dividing their mother’s furniture, starting with the dining-room table.

An old-guard anti-New Deal father and his small son (“Half of life is meeting other people.” / “What’s the other half, Dad?” / “Was that a crack?”).

A young wife who needs peace and privacy to get on with her graduate studies and her job.

A mother-daughter showdown over dancing class vs. horseback riding.

A 10-year-old boy begging Annie the maid, who has worked there all his life, not to quit.

An architect who’s bound and determined to reconfigure the workroom of his client, a psychiatrist (“Suppose we open this up here, slam a beam in here, break through here … ”), and then suddenly tenses up with emotional memory. The client, after a pause: “Do you want to tell me about it?”

A children’s birthday party, many kids, much excitement, that all of an instant, as the candles are being blown out, reveals, like a flash picture, the adulterous affair between one of the mommies and one of the daddies.

A grouchy grandfather laying down the law of common sense.

More John O’Hara bite: The unexpected return from prep school of a 17-year-old who walks in on his mother’s adulterous affair (“Oh mom”).

And so on and so forth until the big final Thanksgiving family reunion — the entire cast — sitting and gabbing around that table.

An entire cast of six: three men, three women.

The play is “The Dining Room.” It was the big breakthrough for playwright A.R. (“Pete”) Gurney at Playwrights’ Horizons almost exactly 25 years ago, and is being brought to the fore again now — its first major New York City revival — in a Keen Company staging by Jonathan Silverstein at the Harold Clurman on 42nd Street’s Theater Row.

“Thornton Wilder in ‘The Long Christmas Dinner’ had a dining room become the focus of a particular family over the years. I just made it multiple dining rooms without changing the set,” says Pete. Gurney.

“Andre Bishop [then artistic director of Playwrights’ Horizons, now artistic director Lincoln Center Theater] said: ‘Are you sure you want to do this play with only six actors? How about the birthday scene with all those kids?’ I said: ‘I think we can do it. Once you establish the convention [of adults playing children], the audience accepts it.’

“Since ‘The Dining Room’ there’s been doubling and tripling all over the place. But I think this play was the first to do it. I’d been experimenting with the form in ‘Scenes From American Life,’ at Lincoln Center 11 years earlier. Matthew Broderick’s father, Jimmy Broderick, was in that, and he was marvelous as a 10-year-old boy.”

Just three years before that — October 1968, at the Players’ Theater on MacDougal Street — fledgling playwright Gurney had been battered by hostile reviews from all quarters except the New Yorker (Edith Oliver) and The Village Voice (this viewer) for his first exposure to the public, a Biblically irreverent comedy called “The David Show.”

Had he been crushed by that brickbatting?

“I was indeed. Extremely disturbed. But it only made me all the more hungry to get back on the horse again.”

The Playwrights’ Horizons “Dining Room” had had a brilliant cast: Lois de Banzie, William H. Macy, Ann McDonough (who’s back in the current production), Pippa Pearthree, Remak Ramsey, John Shea. The director was David Painter, a playwright himself (and Gurney’s choice).

The show had opened at the company’s 60-seat upstairs. When it did well, Bishop moved it downstairs, where there were twice that many seats.

“I said: ‘I don’t think it’ll work down there,” but Andre was right. After some months we moved it again, to the Astor Place, where it ran for two years. Then a second production with a different cast went into the Kennedy Center, and then it spread out to play all over the country.

“Now ‘The Dining Room’ has been done all over the world. It’s the only play of mine” — he’s written around ten fistfuls, most of them hits — “that’s been a success in England. All my other plays got shot down there. It’s been a breadwinner for me,” says Pete Gurney.

Bread on the table in that dining room.

THE DINING ROOM. By A.R. Gurney. Directed by Jonathan Silverstein. A Keen Company production (Carl Forsman, artistic director) entering previews September 11 toward its September 20 opening at the Harold Clurman Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, (212) 279-4200, or ticketcentral.com.