Lake Country Players: The Dining Room: If Only The Table Could Tell Its Stories!

editor’s note: my mid-winter vacation prevented me from covering a
couple of things that I normally would have written about. And it also
meant that I didn’t see two important plays until their closing weekend,
The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s A Doll’s House and The Lake Country Players’ The Dining Room. So my apologies as you read my responses, these shows have already closed.

Playwright A. R. Gurney’s concept for The Dining Room is simply brilliant. The focus is on a formal dining room set in its formal home setting and tells a multitude of stories around American family, class, mores, culture, and history. From breakfasts to dinners to birthday parties to galas to the center of important conversations…we watch families interact, age, and move on. And characters abound…children to parents to grandparents to siblings to the hired help…we are privy to a cross section of activities enjoyed by upper middle class America in the early to mid 20th Century.

Now these activities sometime overlap as one end of the table will be deep in a post dinner discussion while the maid is setting a breakfast lay out at the other end…and characters overlap on entry and exit and activity in any number of ways through out. This of course creates a major headache for the director…but LCP Director Nancy Hurd made short work of it and presented a flowing ensemble moving freely and earnestly around the dining room(s) in question.

But no, it really wasn’t easy as there are only six in the cast list…three actors and three actresses…who each play nine characters each. And not just once and done, but many re-appear as time goes by or as the events being depicted change. So it is impossible here to pick out one particular actor for kudos or one particular character as a focal point of the action. But the ensemble here made it seem so casual and so easy, it was truly amazing!

And of course this also made headaches for the prop managers, costume staff, and stage manager as each character has to be unique in dress and style, each event had its own china or glassware or silver, and of course the choreography of rearranging the cast and the table/chairs has to be on time and smooth. The LCP made it work so incredibly well that every moment was a precious moment and the play flew by without any apparent effort.

CAST LIST:

ACTOR #1 – Mikael Hager
ACTOR #2 – Noah Maguire
ACTOR #3 – Amy Wickland
ACTRESS #1 – Lindsay Strean Hagood
ACTRESS #2 – Paula Nordwig
ACTRESS #3 – Hannah Craig

Once again, I was impressed and amazed by the quality of the work being done by the Lake Country Playhouse. Don’t miss their future events.