THEATER REVIEW:

As a play, A. R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room,” now at Burbank’s Victory Theatre Center, is confusing, isolated, funny and touching, all at the same time.

While the Interact Theatre Company and director Kay Cole can’t necessarily change what Gurney wrote into something less confusing or isolated, they’ve done a great job of making the play funnier and definitely more touching.

Confusing? “The Dining Room” is actually a series of 18 one-act plays, centered in a family dining room. There are 57 characters ranging in age from 5 to 85. They are all played by only six actors, who are obviously having a great time changing names, jobs, relationships and ages, every five minutes, even if the cast might be slightly more convincing whenever playing closer to their own age.

As to how they can do it? It’s called “professionalism.” There isn’t a slouch, a mumbler, or a weak link in the chain. Still, it’s jarring to jump from one scene to another with nothing in particular that connects them beyond a big table with a matching set of chairs.

Isolated? What could be less familiar to a youthful SoCal audience than the backdrop for “The Dining Room,” which relates themes from the upper-middle-class life for Northeastern U.S. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the 1930s?

Assumably, when the play opened successfully in New York in 1981 with John Shea and William H. Macy, there were a lot more audience members from Upstate and points north, still intimately familiar with how it all worked.

Great-Aunt Harriet (Tracy Powell) speaks up eloquently for her way of life, as she patiently explains to her rather dense nephew Tony (Robert Briscoe Evans), an Amherst student, that the maids brought out the finger bowls between the salad and the dessert courses.

Yet Tony is really there only for an anthropology class project — “We’re studying the eating habits of various vanishing cultures,” he says.

This was the world where Gurney grew up, and he writes about it with two parts exasperation, one part gentle sarcasm and three parts pure love, as if to ask, “Why can’t we keep what was good?”

Funny and touching? Every actor gets a chance to shine in this show, and they shine brightly.

This is especially true when their characters are far from “glowing.” Handsome young Matthew Ashford plays a grandfather making it clear to his disaster-prone daughter that he doesn’t want her and the three kids moving back in.

Powell is just as great playing a suburban housewife carrying on an affair during her little girl’s birthday party as she is playing indignant Great-Aunt Harriet.

James Greene is just as fine playing a love-struck adolescent, begging the Irish maid not to leave, as he is playing a rich old uncle, grumbling, “Everyone who sits down with me wants something. Usually it’s money.”

Amanda Tepe wanders happily through the room as a teenager about to have her first sneaked drink.

Briscoe Evans is a delight as Standish, a man determined to risk serious injury at the local country club to avenge an inappropriate slur about his brother’s “social” relationships, whether the comment was true or not. Does the truth matter in his world?

The only missing emotion in “The Dining Room” seems to be genuine rage, as if even anger has a shelf where it’s kept for special occasions.

Cole successfully and swiftly moves the actors in and out of the room, only to have them reappear seconds later in a new scene. The play itself does half the work — asking for no real food, no particular set design or costuming (although Vandy Scoates does a fine job with both), no specific accents, and few props beyond what’s needed for a beautiful table setting.

And how glorious it is to finally see the table fully set out. If there’s anything amiss with this nostalgic look at who Gurney is and where he came from, it’s the play’s ending. It’s unfortunate that he waits until the last few seconds to show us a fantasy-memory of how happy, bright and glorious a formal dinner party used to be.

 MARY BURKIN is a Burbank playwright and actress and Glendale lawyer.  MARY BURKIN is a Burbank playwright and actress and Glendale lawyer.