Old Academy Players brings the company’s season to a close with "The Dining Room," the most celebrated of A.R Gurney's many plays. Under the exuberant direction of Loretta Lucy Miller, seven actors play 53 characters in a series of overlapping vignettes that build a mosaic of a faded world.

A finalist for The Pulitzer Prize, “The Dining Room” (1982) aspires to dramatize upper-class, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (W.A.S.P.) culture in Northeastern America from 1920-1970, or more precisely, to make you feel its decline. With a multiplicity of cameos, the play is an actor's delight and a favorite of community theaters and high school theater groups. 

Night and day

I have seen a high school production of "The Dining Room." It was a good tutorial exercise but a chore to watch. The actors looked like young people pretending to be adults and only the adoring grandmothers in the audience enjoyed the show. But, in the hands of the experienced actors at Old Academy, the play is a delight.

The difference is like the proverbial night and day. Old Academy actors reveled in performing the many adult characters, and were also hilarious in their portrayal of children in various states of petulance, joy, defiance, and perturbation. Uneven in power, the poignancy of many vignettes stood out. 

In one early story set amid the Great Depression, a father (Jay Steinberg) is comically pompous and threatening as he lays down the law to his son (Harrison Rothbaum). He scoffs at FDR's program as handouts to loafers, scorns the boy's schoolteacher, scolds the maid and demands that his son show genuflect respect to his virtuous mother. 

At times, a mix of sexual prurience and thwarted lust is prominent. In one, Peggy (Susan Blair) and Ted (Michael Tarringer) have a furtive, hushed discussion about their affair at a children's birthday party. In another, Paul (Norm Burnosky) and Margery (Susan Matson) make love via a coded talk about how to repair the dining room table.    

Other stories involve desperate acts of temporization to uphold a collapsing world. Characters gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, but Old Lady (Bonnie Kapenstein) stymies the celebration. She is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Her sons sing songs to spark her memory, but achieve only a fleeting respite. 

Gurney squares up his argument in a tragicomic vignette. Tony (Tarringer) interviews Aunt Harriet (Blair). She shows him precious glasswork, bone china, and silverware; she demonstrates the proper use of the finger bowl. Turns out, Tony is writing an anthropology paper and chooses to study the W.A.S.P. instead of an Aboriginal tribe. 

The vignettes are arresting, beginning in the daylight hours of the 1920s, outside imaginary French Windows, when families had maids (often Irish), and ending in the 1970s when cast members dress up for a candlelit nighttime dinner to have a champagne toast "to us." The sense of a dying culture comes across. 

It may not have been Gurney's intention, but you feel the bigger truth of life's evanescence still more strongly. Much like Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," which Old Academy presented last year, these tragicomic characters are seemingly unaware of the eternal void in which their furious cares have such a brief existence. 

 "The Dining Room" will run through June 29. Old Academy Players is at 3544 Indian Queen Lane. Tickets are available at 215-843-1109.