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 drinking, parental bullying, youthful rebellion are recognized but not acknowledged, kept in their place which is certainly not in the dining room.

Since Gurney has adapted a John Cheever story for PBS and since Children (1974), one of his most accomplished plays, was suggested by a Cheever story, some reviewers have seen Gurney as operating in Cheever territory. So he does, but it is Gurney country, to. The analogy is most useful if it draws Cheever admirers to Gurney, for the two writers share not simply the same geographical and psychological areas, but the same tone of ironic dismay, the oblique comedy of necessary loss. In one of the sequences in the play, an Amherst student gets his aunt to demonstrate the table service that was once used for formal dinners; he explains, as he snaps away with his camera, that it is his anthropology assignment, his contribution to a series on the eating habits of vanishing tribes—this one the WASPs of the American Northeast. If the play were no more than that joke implies it would be a relatively simple exercise in polite satire. At one point, in a teasing scene with a stockbroker turned furniture repairer, a woman gets under the table for the first time, thinking that a dining room table is "something special," and discovers that it is "just wood" underneath. The strength of the play lies in the way it uses its accumulation of situations to suggest that the table is more than "just wood," that the obsolescence of the dining room represents not only the casting off of the family gathering as often unwilling shared pretense but the loss of values as well. (pp. 243-44)