ABSTRACT
The critics’ response to Gurney’s play suggests that audiences in New York and throughout the country enjoyed what they believed was a warmhearted evocation of the decline of WASP culture, deftly characterizing its strengths as well as its foibles and failings. Echoing other reviewers, one Boston critic termed the effect of the play like “a tour through a museum…, guided by a knowledgable, witty, mildly amused and very perceptive curator” (Lehman, 25). “Dining Room is pure but incisive Americana,” wrote a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “an anthropological study of the style and rituals of that maligned, misunderstood ethnic majority, the welloff” (Nachman, 34). A local critic in Westport, Connecticut dubbed Gurney ’s depiction of WASP ethnicity “stingingly on-target,” but added that the play “emerges as affectionate ribbing nonetheless” (Killen, 18). In a similar vein, Dan Isaac in Other Stages noted the comedy’s “political and anthropological” focus on “the American upper-class as a delinquent, dying culture,” but concluded that “The Dining Room will probably enter the permanent repertory and join Our Town and Ah, Wilderness! as a model of vintage Americana” (2).1
