STAGE REVIEW : ‘Dining Room’ Serves Up Past : South O.C. Community Theatre production also is a knowing nod to the actor’s game of shifting personae.

A.R. Gurney’s game in writing “The Dining Room” is partly in what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t establish and stay with one set of characters. He doesn’t set his play in one dining room. He doesn’t, actually, create a play in any conventional sense.

Like riders on a carousel, Gurney’s declining WASP clans move in and out of a prototypical dining room in brief bits of time--brief enough that they seem like images flipped through in a family photo album, but long enough that they make an impression. The subject of “The Dining Room” isn’t the dining room at all, but the various characters adopted and then tossed aside like clothes by the six performers.

It’s also about the actor’s game, a knowing nod and a wink at the illusion of shifting from one persona to another. A wonderful exercise, in other words, for any theater, and you have to admire San Juan Capistrano’s South Orange County Community Theatre for flexing its muscles this way, even when it doesn’t have all the moves down.

The most difficult move deals with one of Gurney’s deepest concerns, which is how time inexorably changes everything. How, for instance, the room used to be the center of family life and rituals and now is the place to fold the laundry. For the actor, it’s the difference in nuance between contemporary and “older” behavior, a nuance frequently lost by B.J. Scott’s ensemble (Tony Grande, David Leckness, Timothy John Pacific, Andi Wilson, Carrie Pohlhammer and Monica Ponte).

Because of the speed of the scene changes (there are even overlaps; a character from the previous scene will be cleaning up as the new folks arrive), the actors can’t go through elaborate physical changes. Scott and her group’s greatest strength is in keeping up the pace, without seeming winded. Although the readings occasionally lean toward the rote, they’re balanced by a palpable pleasure in Gurney’s limpid language and the sheer fun in pulling the thing off.

They do it with a few points against them, such as a squeaky set of dining room chairs and (because of the theater’s flat floor) a platform set by Tom Scott that places the actors dangerously close to the lights. It’s all part of the game--of “The Dining Room,” and community theater.

‘The Dining Room’

A South Orange County Community Theatre production of the play by A.R. Gurney, directed by B.J. Scott. Set by Tom Scott. With Tony Grande, David Leckness, Timothy John Pacific, Andi Wilson, Carrie Pohlhammer and Monica Ponte. Continues Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through Dec. 12 at the Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano (except Thanksgiving Day). $10. (714) 489-8082. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.