ABSTRACT

Dinner theatre is a performance practice that conveniently combines two elements of an evening out: dinner and a show. The dinner party is a space that invites theatricality, rather than the kind of performativity that scholars now understand as constitutive of experience. While plays that are dinner parties occupy a very specific place in contemporary theatre, plays that stage dinner parties are much more common. Rather than inviting the audience to share in the experience of eating together, these plays ask the audience to watch a dinner party unfold, demonstrating the theatricality of the dinner party instead of drafting an audience into enacting it. Though the plays emphasize their contemporaneity, this emphasis underscores their incorporation of modernist techniques of self-reflexivity, irony, and the critique of realism. The dinner party is both a space of gendered solidarity and a space of virtuosic performance; each of these women knows the limits of her role, and exactly how impolite she can be.