That stimulating writer A. R. Gurney Jr. has come up with The Dining Room, in which an elegant, old-fashioned (though not genuinely antique) dining room serves as the real and symbolic setting for countless, not directly related lives—or, rather, telltale fragments of them—forming a passing parade of Wasp America—preppie, post-preppie, and anti-preppie—from its heyday to its present, precariously eked-out survival. The dining room is the scene of much more than merely eating—of assorted fun, sadness, contentment, and rebellion—as a modus vivendi goes from viable to friable.

One problem here may be excessive trickiness. In Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, from which this play seems to derive, there is, although stylized and accelerated, a consecutive progression and confinement to one family. Gurney, however, jumps back and forth in time, around in place (this only seems to be the same dining room), and...