Stage

...It is a well-appointed dining room, old style, one that conjures formal family meals and all that that implies in both negative and positive senses...

...The six performers (three men, three women) move from one role to another, playing now an adult, now a child, sometimes a servant, sometimes a householder, and the skill of both the playwright and the actors establishes a new family, a new situation within a few lines...

...The form of these two plays reflects their subject matter...

...If the play were no more than that joke implies it would be a relatively simple exercise in polite satire...

...Since Gurney has adapted a John Cheever story for PBS and since Children (1974), one of his most accomplished plays, was suggested by a Cheever story, some reviewers have seen Gurney as operating in Cheever territory...

...At the end, he is as.dead as Gurney's dining room, and surely the play intends to suggest a sense of loss as well as a sense of relief...

...American innocence abroad, as Vietnam taught us, can be deadly, and the American family in the formal sense can be a stalking horse for social and personal distress, but the loss of that innocence and the disintegration of that family has brought not knowledge and individual strength, but uncertainty, unhappiness, disorientation...

...Amlin Gray's How I Got That Story takes place a long way from Gurney's dining room...

...It is a world in which adultery, homosexuality, heavy drinking, parental bullying, youthful rebellion are recognized but not acknowledged, kept in their place which is certainly not in the dining room...

...he explains, as he snaps away with his camera, that it is his anthropology assignment, his contribution to a series on the eating habits of vanishing tribes - this one the WASPs of the American Northeast...

...As all Gurney's characters are played by six performers constantly shifting roles, so all Gray's characters, other than the reporter (Don Scardino), are played by Bob Gunton, who is billed simply as The Historical Event...

...In the opening sequence, the father, a stickler for routine, offers his idea of personal and political propriety as substantive truth, but does so against the discordant voice of his very respectful son whose teacher has just told him that there is something called a Depression going on out there...

...Not exactly...

...What the play shows is the way "out there" enters the dining room, disrupts the family structure, renders the room obsolete, reveals the canker on the rose...

...Part of the appeal of both plays lies in the opportunities they provide for thespic ingenuity, but there is more than technical games at work here...

...The analogy is most useful if it draws Cheever admirers to Gurney, for the two writers share not simply the same geographical and psychological areas, but the same tone of ironic dismay, the oblique comedy of necessary loss...

...So he does, but it is Gurney country, too...

...Although there is a deal of pretty obvious satirical comment on such American actions, the title suggests that the real subject is the role of the American press...

...The room represents not a particular home or family, but a host of such dining rooms peopled by families in varying degrees of stability or disintegration...

...In one of the sequences in the play, an Amherst student gets his aunt to demonstrate the table service that was once used for formal dinners...

...Since the first half of the play is broadly funny, my description may make it sound more solemn than it actually is, but the first act does set the theme which is reiterated in the second when the reporter, without ever losing his helpless and hopeless innocence, discards his calling and attempts to sink into an Amboland that does not want him...

...It needs no well-made play to tell us that...

...The reporter, the play's protagonist, arrives in Amboland, alive with naivety and ambition, only to discover that he understands nothing and is continually pained and bewildered by people and events when he feels he should observe with professional objectivity...

...The plays consist of fragments...

...Compared to Gurney, who, has been writing quietly effective plays for twenty-five years, Gray is a relative newcomer to the art, but one who has been extremely productive in the few years since he made his debut at the O'Neill Theatre Center...

...The winner of a 1981 Obie award now back for a commercial run, Gray's play is set in Ambo-land, a lightly fictionalized Vietnam which might stand for any place in which the American presence shores up a dictatorial government and the Americans display the combination of corruption and high platitude that such a situation demands...

...The central character of Gurney's play is the setting...

...At one point, in a teasing scene with a stockbroker turned furniture repairer, a woman gets under the table for the first time, thinking that a dining room table is "something special," and discovers that it is "just wood" underneath...

...The strength of the play lies in the way it uses its accumulation of situations to suggest that the table is more than "just wood," that the obsolescence of the dining room represents not only the casting off of the family gathering as often unwilling shared pretense but the loss of values as well...

...the characters are suggested, assumed rather than developed...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Gurney, Jr.'s The Dining Room - both well-received in their current off-Broadway runs - but there are thematic and technical similarities that make it possible to think of the two plays as very different parts of one pattern...