The Dining Room

My son, Nick, is in the Brainerd High School Play “The Dining Room.”
Friday night was opening night and we have tickets for all three performances.

A.R. Gurney wrote the play as a commentary on northern New England WASP culture and he uses the setting of a Dining Room to give us 18 vignettes. The center of the Dining Room is of course, a dining room table. Around and near the table we see and hear dramas of life, love relationships, family activities, joys, sorrows, rituals of propriety, romantic affairs, birthday parties, perceived insults and issues of shame and family honor, dreams unfulfilled, a women wanting to come home because there is no where else to go; an aged father giving funeral instructions to a son, a turkey dinner strained by the dementia of the family matriarch, conversations of money, politics, sexuality and values,..and in the end, a vision of a perfect dinner party...and through it all, there is a table.

The religious symbolism for me came early whether Gurney intended or not: human life and a table. A table of welcome . A table of some authority and history. A communion table. Some times it has healed us and called us, sometimes it has not been well presented and becomes a cause of division and distress. As in the play, sometimes we argue about the table, what its proper uses are and who should control it.
But finally it remains, and it too holds fast for a larger vision of hospitality. In the end it is a witness of Presence and hope.
No doubt a few dining rooms and tables will “come into play” this week for Thanksgiving with gatherings of family and friends. May they be tokens of the Greater Dining Table. May they “play well” as a place of family. The play ends in a toast, for all the gathered characters; "To all of us."