Real People, Real Spaces: The Art of Morphing

I love "The Dining Room"!

Rehearsals are going SO well. The directors are wonderful, the cast is great, and everyone works wonderfully together. I am very, very excited for this show, and so thankful to be a part of it.

At one of our earlier rehearsals, Julia, our director, asked us to read through the entire script, and ask ourselves, what is the essence of this play? There are a lot of sweet, funny moments in this play, but there are also a lot of bleak, desperate moments that find people in sad situations, and sometimes at the end of their rope. As Julia said, one could walk away from this play and say, "Wow, that was a really depressing play about a lot of unhappy people." Why is it not that? How is this (potentially controversial) play justifiable?

I'm really falling in love with "The Dining Room". One reason is that I believe while many of the characters in this play are caught in moments of desperation, or shame, or weakness, they are just utterly, utterly real. When we discussed it together at rehearsal, we agreed that if someone judged this play, and these characters, solely by the brief spaces of time in which they appear onstage, that would be a mistake. These people are purely human, and we all have moments like these, moments that we cherish, moments that we fear, moments that we wish we could forget. I ask the audience not to think only about what they see, but what the don't see; how has this person come to this place in their life? What has happened to them to make them who they are, in this moment? I feel it's almost like reading a few pages from the middle of someone's diary. It can reveal a lot about who they are, but it's not all of who they are.

Another thing that I love about this play is that everything happens in the same space - the dining room. The people change, the times change, characters and families and problems shuffle in and out of this single space. I've found those stationary spaces of our lives intriguing for some time now. Think of the house you grew up in, or your childhood bedroom, or even your car. These place, these spaces, remain virtually the same, but there's something about us that changes them; they absorb our energy, our emotions, our memories, until we can't enter into them without entering into a part of ourselves. The dining room is such a perfect room for that; it has so many roles for so many people. A place to eat, a place to study, a place to gather, a place to feel safe. Every time one of us enters that dining room, in whichever of our several characters, we change it, so that while the set and props may remain the same, the space itself, just like our characters, is constantly changing. As actors, we must morph to fit our characters; when we do, the room, and everything it represents, morphs with us.