Table Manners

More roles than meets the eye: Laurel Andersen (hands clasped), and next to her Oriana Inferrera; and behind them, l-r, Jason Boxer, drama director and producer Carol Mathews, Kristin O’Brien, Kellianne Safarik, Sam Henneberry, and director Luke Yankee. Photo Theater and sociology converge at Mira Costa High School A.R. Gurney is perhaps best known for “Love Letters,” a two-person play that accrued lots of frequent flyer miles after its debut in 1990. Some years earlier, in 1982, “The Dining Room” garnered praise and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. One can say many things about it, beginning with: It’s not your typical play. “The Dining Room” – which the Mira Costa Drama Department is presenting this weekend and next – is being billed as a portrait of the WASP, or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and specifically those members of the upper-middle-class who traditionally gathered , en famille, and together enjoyed breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Often, various degrees of formal etiquette were observed, but mostly it was time spent as a family unit. Gurney’s play is something of a social history of this once-prevalent aspect of American life, at least as it was most prominently in…

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