Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Table manners

When I was little, my brother and I ate our “supper” at the kitchen table around 6 o’clock every evening. 

It made sense. My mother didn’t get home until maybe 7 and then there were cocktails, so my parents often wouldn’t eat before 8:30. When did this sensible arrangement change? I guess I was 9 or 10 when I was moved from supper in the kitchen to dinner in the dining room. 

A rite of passage, I suppose (few, if any, of those are left anymore). The trouble was, the dinner time didn’t change.

It could be close to 9 o’clock by the time we were “excused from the table” — a little tedious for grade-schoolers. Nobody dressed for dinner, or had more than one fork to eat with, but the frayed remains of dining room protocols were powerful enough for my family to try and replicate, however unsuccessfully, the vestiges of an earlier, more graceful, more predictable era.

When I first auditioned for A.R. Gurney’s well-known play, “The Dining Room,” directed by Michael Disher and being presented this month at Center Stage at the Southampton Arts Center, I was immediately reminded of the dining room of my childhood.

All the action of the play unfolds in its dining room, one that bears silent witness to all the hilarity and heartbreak of the humans who variously inhabit it over the decades. Gurney has a jeweler’s eye for human nature and is as unsparing as he is empathetic when it comes to our human race towards and/or away from human connection.

Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to appear with professional actor and beloved long-time Island resident, Forrest Compton, in another Gurney favorite and Pulitzer prize-winner, “Love Letters” (1988, a two-character love letter to the vanishing grace notes that seemed to stitch society together, at least for some of us). Gurney wrote his last play, “Love and Money,” in 2015. Sadly, he passed away in 2017.

Toward the end of the production notes for “The Dining Room,”  Gurney is led to emphasize this point: “The thing to remember is that this is not a play about dishes or food … but rather a play about people in a dining room.”

Though I agree with Gurney about almost everything, I’m not so sure about that. Coming down the home stretch towards opening night (by the way, another Islander, mistress of all trades theatrical and wonderful actor, Sue Cincotta, is also in our cast of 12), I’m moved to give them equal billing — the humans and the room. Where we eat, what we eat, how we eat and with whom we eat has always been a “tell” that reveals a great deal about humans being humans in any given cultural moment.

For western civilization, being the new kid on the block, the calcification of dining protocols began early, from the “below the salt” injunction of the Middle Ages, that “guests of higher status would be seated ‘above the salt,’ [salt being a highly prized commodity] closer to the host, while those of lower status would be seated ‘below the salt’ … symbolizing someone of lower social standing or importance (quora.com)” to the elaborate etiquette of the Gilded Age, the ghost of which nonetheless provides “Downton Abbey” fascination for even this fast-food generation.

Indeed, Gurney’s slightly tragicomedy of manners has awakened me to the power that cultural mandates, even dying ones, have over humans, and the extraordinary influence they can exert for good or ill. In one scene, I play an elderly woman suffering from dementia.

She gathers with her family around the tradition-laden Thanksgiving table, but she recognizes no one — not her children, not the long-time servants.

Of course, she is oblivious to the shock and sadness her children are experiencing. She is living in the reality of 70 years before, and confused and anxious. The only recourse she has in this strange, unfamiliar place is to practice the unfailingly good manners she’d been taught in her childhood. 

Per usual, I may be over-emphasizing the social relevance of this play when first and foremost, it’s wildly entertaining! Like its author, the play’s director, Michael Disher, combines a light touch with a laser focus as he leaves no rich vein of Gurney’s humor or pathos un-mined. He knows his actors, and he knows this play. And if there was ever a time to see and enjoy it, it’s now.

Back in 1981, The Wall Street Journal called Gurney’s works “penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat.” From a 2024 perspective, “The Dining Room” is much more than that.

“The Dining Room” will run at the Southampton Arts Center from April 26 through April 28.

Several local restaurants are offering dinner discounts for playgoers. Ask about them when you call for tickets and information at 631-283-0967.