Each of us, sooner or later, is cast in someone's idea of a perfect dinner party - the kind made memorable by feats of social alchemy.
A host and/or hostess selects guests based on complementary (or, optionally, colliding) sensibilities. Whether the menu calls for Normandy pheasant or lasagna, the key to the visitors list is balance, not homogenization; lively association, not combat.
Topics are introduced, views are defended, op-ed columns are referenced. Passions rise and glide away between courses. The founder of the feast at once fuels, smoothes and democratizes these proceedings with the inarguable blessing of shared food.
In other words, a perfect dinner party is a form of theater - politicized, perhaps, but theater (not to be confused with artifice) all the same.
"Omnium-Gatherum," a new play that premièred at the 2003 Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival and is making its West Coast debut at Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre, explores the theatrical structure and rituals of a dinner party. Specifically, a special dinner party that proves - both practically and allegorically - a suitable vehicle for forging wisdom out of despair in post-9/11 America.
Written by Peabody Award-winning playwright Theresa Rebeck and Steppenwolf Theatre veteran Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, "Omnium-Gatherum" is set at a packed table on an autumn night in New York City, mere days after terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The hostess is Suzie (Marianne Owen), an attractive, single, self-made millionaire maven of enhanced domestic living. With her shoulder-length blond hair, she is an obvious echo of Martha Stewart.
Suzie's elegant, round table is set in high-rise digs offering some spooky touches - among them, distressing, metallic noises from outside and unnervingly close flyovers by helicopters. This dinner, a naked grab at normalcy after 9/11, is apparently quite close to the site of WTC horrors. (Co-author Rebeck has said, "This is what it felt like to live in New York in the days after the attacks ... a dinner party at the end of the world. A mad tea party. Everyone was trying to figure out who had died - and we were told, 'Shop, spend money, revitalize the city.' It was bizarre.")
Suzie's outspoken guests are a varied bunch; most, like her, invite comparisons to highly visible figures in the real world. Right-wing, best-selling author Roger brings Tom Clancy to mind, though actor Eddie Levi Lee has a certain braying quality that evokes Rush Limbaugh as well. Hard-drinking, Cambridge-educated gadfly Terence superficially suggests Christopher Hitchens; however, Kent Broadhurst runs with the character in a uniquely entertaining direction of his own. Pro-Palestinian scholar Khalid (Joseph Kamal) respectfully, even lovingly, reminds one of the late, great Columbia professor and writer Edward Said.
Other visitors to Suzie's big table (which ever so slowly revolves on ACT's Allen Theatre stage, permitting the audience to see each actor's face part of the time) include Julia (Cynthia Jones), an African-American minister; Jeff (David Drummond), a firefighter who performed heroically at the twin towers; and Lydia (Mari Nelson), an angry, inflexible vegan-feminist. A pair of servers (Jane May and Timothy Evans) skitter about noiselessly at Suzie's behest.
We enter the story during that chatty disarray between introductions and the arrival of appetizers. The cast and director Jon Jory capture the tone perfectly. Characters are caught in a crossfire of palaver. One guest, inevitably, jumps the gun by introducing a Serious Subject. Despite shrugging out a retraction, the embarrassed fellow is obliged to carry on at the insistence of a highly distracted and sometimes garish Suzie.
From there, "Omnium-Gatherum" continues its keen observance of social manners and behavior even as the characters vigorously lock horns over values and ideologies. We see and hear the obvious tensions (Roger and Lydia attacking one another over vegetarianism, Khalid offering a disapproving capsule history of globalization), but we don't miss the subtle ones (a subconsciously racist remark by Suzie) either.
While debate rages on among the characters about reasons behind the 9/11 attacks and hatred of America, one never loses sight of the rules to this game. Frank Rich of The New York Times has accused "Omnium-Gatherum" of being a flashy display of ideas no deeper than a shouting match on Fox News. But what sticks to the ribs is not so much the content of the right-left arguments as the fact that each of these characters is obliged, by unspoken civility, to come to rest again at Suzie's table, intellectually spent, breaking bread with the others. (Or not, actually: the play's biggest laugh accompanies cuisine-trendsetter Suzie's inexplicable decree, "Bread is over.")
It sounds corny, but "Omnium-Gatherum" is about family in the biggest, most globally and historically failure-ridden, yet most hopeful, sense of all. Fear not, however, that this 90-minute, uninterrupted play descends into sentimental goo. There is, it turns out, one more guest (well played by Dennis Mosley) at Suzie's party, whose late arrival nudges this play, unexpectedly, toward greater sorrow, greater stakes and, finally, toward the mystical.
There have been one or two other plays, produced on New York stages, set in the aftermath of the city's greatest disaster. Surely there will be more to come with passing years and increased perspective, as well as films, poetry and music about the same. There is so much to collectively remember and grieve. "Omnium-Gatherum" may be overshadowed one day by more profound works, but for now it is striking in its traumatized immediacy and trembling reach for the oracular.
Freelance writer Tom Keogh reviewed "The Gingerbread Man" and "School of Rock" in recent issues of the News.[[In-content Ad]]
