STAGE REVIEW : ‘Dining Room’ Finds a Good Home in Pasadena

The Pasadena Playhouse. Of course. That’s where A. R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room� belongs.

When this comedy about the vanishing Northeastern WASP first appeared in the Los Angeles area in 1985, it was at the Coronet Theatre in West Hollywood. An unadorned stage in a New Money community, on a busy commercial street. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Pasadena Playhouse is an elegantly framed stage in an Old Money community, on a side street. Short of moving cast and audience to an equivalent theater in New England, the play could hardly have a more proper home. Fortunately, David Saint’s staging is worthy of its environs.

“The Dining Room� examines the domestic life of Old Money types. People who still think about finger bowls at the dinner table, even if they no longer use them. People who never have to think much about how to pay the bills.

The structure of the play is not as conservative as its subject. It’s a series of short sketches, each with different characters. From one scene to another, the characters share the same dining-room set, but there is no direct connection, no indication that they even know the people in the other scenes.

Before an episode ends, the next one’s characters are likely to emerge in the background, so the two scenes overlap. But the characters from different stories don’t notice each other--they might be living in completely different eras. Besides, their mothers taught them not to stare at strangers and their fathers taught them never to disclose how surprised they sometimes are. So even if they did notice the characters from another scene, chances are they would be very discreet about it.

This kind of reticence might thwart the dramatic impulse in lesser hands. But there is no lack of drama in “The Dining Room.� Much of it is between the generations. Some of it is marital or extramarital. Some of it is between those who understand dining rooms, and those who don’t.

Among those who really understand dining rooms are the people who wait on the tables, and gradually we see them leaving. They don’t want to do domestic service any more.

We also see the dining rooms themselves being carved up or carted away. An architect, who clearly hated every minute he was in the dining room as he grew up, proposes converting it into a psychiatrist’s office. A young student is interested in his aunt’s dinner service--but only because he’s doing an anthropology project.

While this particular character may appear insensitive, Gurney was functioning as a kind of anthropologist himself. His gaze is gentle but penetrating; he peers into his characters’ inner lives with an unclouded eye.

Yet there is nothing academic about his work. Many of his scenes are like live-action New Yorker cartoons.

The broadness of the caricature varies from scene to scene, but there are laugh-out-loud moments in nearly all of them.

Each actor plays nine or 10 roles. The age range of the characters is much wider than that of the cast. Adults who play kids can get irritating, but in this case, the brevity of the scenes and their comic flavor allows us to suspend disbelief long enough to make allowances. In only one brief moment, when Conrad Bain is allowed to lisp one of the kids’ lines, is that delicate balance upset.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Bain is perfect as two old-timers, and relatively young Amanda Carlin treats the very oldest character with as much accuracy and respect as she brings to the birthday girl in a kid scene or the mixed-up young mom who wants to return to the nest.

The only scene that’s not quite up to snuff is one with Carlin and Mark Arnott as a husband and wife, arguing over whether she can place her typewriter on the sacred table. Arnott is a bit too restrained here, but later his restraint is superb as father to Carlin’s aforementioned mixed-up daughter, and as son to Bain’s funeral-preparing father.

Debra Mooney and Arnott create ample sexual tension as a divorced table owner and the carpenter who comes to check out the table’s underside, and Mooney has a sharp edge as a mother accused of adultery by her son.

Anne Swift is equally funny as a harried mom and a blase teen-ager. And when Reed Birney works up a delicious snit as Standish, the upright defender of his “bachelor� brother’s honor, Swift supports her husband’s quest with high style.

Douglas D. Smith’s set isn’t quite in the void described in the Gurney text; we can see a staircase outside the dining room. Nor does Michael Gilliam’s lighting change quite as much as Gurney suggested. But it’s nonetheless a handsome package for Gurney’s ironic evocation of a fading culture.

“The Dining Room,� Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug . 25. $29. (818) 356-PLAY, (213) 480-3232. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

‘The Dining Room’

With Mark Arnott, Conrad Bain, Reed Birney, Amanda Carlin, Debra Mooney, Anne Swift

By A. R. Gurney. Directed by David Saint. Set by Douglas D. Smith. Lighting by Michael Gilliam. Costumes by Ann Bruice. Production stage manager Kathleen Horton. Stage manager Cheri Catherine Cary.