It’s a solid wood table, split at the center to accommodate an extra leaf (or maybe two). It comes with six large, hard-seated chairs, all shipped in 1898 from a factory in Wilkes-Barre, Penn. It’s the sort of furniture about which people say, “They don’t make it like that any more.” Indeed, this is said several times during the course of A.R. Gurney’s social history of 20th-century America as revealed by its rituals conducted within the sanctuary surrounding this icon.
In this room, we hear a mother unsuccessfully attempt to forestall her prepubescent daughter’s romantic impulses, and a father successfully turn his son from democratic influence. We see a young man petition his grandsire for the money that will provide him an education far from home and a young woman in a troubled marriage negotiate a return to the nest. A small boy bids a heartbroken farewell to a departing housemaid, a prep-school youth returns home unexpectedly to discover his mother in an illicit affair, and two teenage academy-girls make an unsupervised raid on their parents’ liquor cabinet. An aged father reviews his funeral arrangements, a family Thanksgiving dinner is disrupted by the clan dowager’s wavering memory, while another supper is aborted as Daddy rushes off to avenge an insult to the sibling whose “bachelor acquaintances” have aroused comment among their club fellows. (“Is Uncle Henry a fruit?” asks one of the children, adroitly dispensing with euphemisms.)
This milieu is identified as “the WASPs of Northern New England” by the nephew who outrages his aunt with ridicule of her antiquated lifestyle, but Gurney’s documentation is not restricted to that privileged segment of the population. If the arc of the individual scenes grow somewhat repetitive after a time…children defy the status quo while their parents defend it (albeit sometimes abandoning white-collar jobs to pursue hobbies full-time, as with the stockbroker-turned-carpenter who bonds with a freshly divorced matron over the restoration of that same venerable table)…it is in part due to the capable ensemble work of the six actors assembled for this TinFish theatre production, whose protean rendering of their disparate characters…57 in all…allows us to find the universality in Gurney’s insights into our country’s progress from Elitism to Egalitarianism.