‘Dining Room’ and the empty plate of WASP America

Manners, propriety and the Old Guard in the Sonoma Arts Live new production opening Jan. 19.|

If American culture is a savory stew, WASPs were at one time its primary ingredient – an idea at the heart of playwright A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room,” the latest production of Sonoma Arts Live.

WASP is shorthand for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an identifier that – by today’s standards – skews vaguely racist. In the heyday of its mid-20th-century use, though, WASPs were the ideal: stiff upper-lipped gentry atop a cultural strata peddled as aspiration to the clamoring horde.

If you know starboard from port, you might be a WASP. If you’ve ever played polo or know the rules for lacrosse, you might be a WASP. If your ecclesiastical grandmother prized a stiff upper lip and exhorted the family not to air dirty laundry, you might be a WASP. And nostalgic for the old days.

Sonoma Arts Live is nostalgic, too, harkening back with a season dedicated to the theme of “days gone by.”

“The Dining Room” time-travels back to a simpler era when white upper-middle class America still existed, and the stability and comfort of that paradigm kept a kind of cultural peace. Mostly.

The play is centered around a dining room table where, in a variety of vignettes, an ensemble of players reflect iconic moments of their shared culture: Dad bungles the carving of the Thanksgiving bird, Mom is passive-aggressive with Junior’s new girlfriend, Uncle Carter drinks too much, again, and young Norberg derides the neighbor’s new money like the heir to the Old Guard that he is. “The Dining Table” is a play ripe with longing and farce, comedic and poignant at the same time.

“WASPs do have a culture – traditions, idiosyncrasies, quirks, particular signals and totems we pass on to one another,” Gurney once told the Washington Post. “But the WASP culture is enough in the past so that now we can look at it with some objectivity, smile at it, and even appreciate some of its values. There was a closeness of family, a commitment to duty, to stoic responsibility, which I think we have to say weren’t entirely bad.”

It’s a world away from the one we know now, where feelings are felt and capaciously shared and cultural indignation rains down unabated, where “white” is no longer an option on demographic questionnaires, and the idea of religion is a quaint notion for many.

“The Dining Room” looks back to a simpler time when American culture was cleanly binary: the Have’s at the table, at ease and feasting; the Have Not’s outside the dining room windows, awaiting their moment, patience waning.

Contact Kate at kate.williams@sonomanews.org

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