The central character of Gurney's [The Dining Room] is the setting. It is a well-appointed dining room, old style, one that conjures formal family meals and all that that implies in both negative and positive senses. The room represents not a particular home or family, but a host of such dining rooms peopled by families in varying degrees of stability or disintegration…. In the opening sequence, the father, a stickler for routine, offers his idea of personal and political propriety as substantive truth, but does so against the discordant voice of his very respectful son whose teacher has just told him that there is something called a Depression going on out there. What the play shows is the way "out there" enters the dining room, disrupts the family structure, renders the room obsolete, reveals the canker on the rose. It is a world in which adultery, homosexuality, heavy...