The Daily Times

I was raised eating around a kitchen table. It would almost be fair to say I was raised in a kitchen. Those who know me and my girth would probably be quick to agree.

I love the kitchen. To me it is home. It represents warmth, love and nourishment. It’s my mother’s domain, and, to me, the kitchen is the mother of the house.

When I was a youngster, I would sit in the kitchen while my mother cooked and play my guitar for her. More evenings than I can remember passed with me sitting on a kitchen chair making music while mom made food. It’s one of the strongest and fondest memories I have of my childhood home.

The characters and situations in Foothills Community Players’ current production “The Dining Room” couldn’t be more antithetical to my experience.

The sequence of 18 interconnecting vignettes doesn’t have a through line plot in the traditional sense; rather, the scenes from disparate households spanning several decades seek emotional and thematic cohesion.

The action takes place around a dining room table manufactured in 1898. The stories told in this play jump families and time periods, but the type of family presented is consistently WASP — white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. The play comments on the foibles of the WASP culture while, at the same time lamenting modern culture’s loss of stability and togetherness that has come to be symbolized by a traditional dining room meal.

Director David Ratliff makes a nod to the emotional distance people like me have from the central conceit of the play by setting the Haslam Family Flexible Theatre like a museum exhibit. He takes the concept to the extreme, even having audience members wait outside the theater in small groups before having a “tour guide” lead them into the performance space with a treatise on WASP culture and the tradition of the dining room meal.

Most of the situations depicted in the play are foreign to me. WASPS eat in a sterile environment, separated from the place foods comes from. The kitchen is the realm of the help and the uncouth. The room where these people eat is, for all practical purposes, a museum already. Ratliff’s museum exhibit set design serves to underline and punctuate that feeling.

Of course, the dining room in this play isn’t devoid of emotion. Some truly moving scenes take place here too. One of the most poignant scenes comes toward the end of the play. A father (Doug Berry) and his adult son (Mitch Moore) duck into the dining room to discuss the father’s funeral arrangements.

Eloquent performances from the two actors make this scene both subtle and touching. As the two men converse, the source of the son’s discomfort becomes more and more clear. He’s not upset about death. He’s uncomfortable having such an intimate conversation with his father. It’s almost as if this conversation is a mirror image of a “birds and the bees” type conversation two of them might have had in the son’s teenage years.

The scene comes to a moment of catharsis when the father looks at his son and asks “You do love me, don’t you son?”

“Yes,” he says.

No matter what kind of table you grew up eating around, the emotion of that moment rings true.

Timothy Hankins is a writer, musician and arts critic who contributes a regular column to Weekend. Contact him at (weekendcolumn@hnkns.com)

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