Director Fills ‘Room’ With Views : A subtle Costa Mesa Playhouse production conveys the playwright’s sly commentary on glimpses of WASPdom without embalming the inhabitants.

The cultural anthropology of “The Dining Room,” A. R. Gurney’s playful treatment of the disappearing Northeastern WASP, can be skewed toward nostalgia or satire with overweening zeal. Any director inclined to make the case for “creative” staging can find logic on both sides.

To lean too heavily in either direction, however, seems a distortion of what Gurney had in mind. Which is why Keith Wolfe’s foursquare approach to the play at the Costa Mesa Playhouse has a certain appeal. His staging may lack nuance at times--something to be expected in an amateur production--but it is generally clarifying and not without subtlety.

For example, just as the playwright recommends in his stage directions, a velvet rope is slung between low stanchions in front of the spare dining-room set to suggest a museum exhibit. It’s all that’s needed to make Gurney’s sly point about putting a species and its habitat on display.

Wolfe appreciates the understatement.

He realizes he need not elbow us in the ribs the way the director of another “Dining Room” revival did last year at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. She laid on a tongue-in-cheek tour guide leading a small crowd through the premises. That giddy preamble to the play illuminated nothing more than the director’s condescension to the audience.

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But while this production is straightforward, it is far from a hushed diorama. It has its share of antic humor and offers a steady parade of entertaining scenes that peek in on the suburban lives of various families, beginning in the 1930s and reaching through the decades more or less to the present.

Gurney sketches in what has become his usual assortment of types: illicit lovers, society matrons, kids on their birthdays, domestic servants, the recently married, the soon-to-be-divorced and the fathers and grandfathers who foot the bills. They are ludicrous and grand, earthy and pretentious.

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At the same time, there is a poignancy in their portraits.

Each of them--whether facing a crisis or trying to ignore one--embodies the calamity of an age whose radically changing mores have invaded the sacrosanct precinct of the dining room itself, altering their lives and, inevitably, the landscape of their relationships.

The six actors (three women and three men, all playing multiple roles) give creditable performances. Though the ensemble has a few rough edges, it works well together.

The costumes are appropriate. And the lighting and set design are effective, especially in a final tableau that evokes the sumptuous perfection of an ideal table setting.

*”The Dining Room,” Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, 661 Hamilton St., Costa Mesa. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 27. $10. (714) 650-5269. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes. A Costa Mesa Playhouse presentation of a play written by A.R. Gurney. Directed by Keith Wolfe. Co-produced by Chet Groskreutz and Cheryl Young. With Kelly Godfrey-Allen, Bill Tigue, Rufino Cabang, Sharon Ezell, Alison Regan, John Parker. Set design: Steeve Jacobs. Costumes: Pa Tompkins. Lighting design: Mark Andrew. Stage manager: Denise Kenney.