'Dinner' Served Lukewarm

The Huntington Theatre Company began its run of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a stage play based on the Academy Award-winning movie starring Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. The movie was originally released in theaters in 1967 and is heralded as one of the major examples in mainstream America to bring the taboo subject of interracial marriage to public discussion. Joanna Dayton (Meredith Forlenza) returns to her white, liberal family after a year working abroad, only to announce that she is dating her older African American colleague Dr. John Prentice (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) and that the two of them have plans to marry. Her parents Christina Dayton (Julia Duffy) and Matt Dayton (Will Lyman) must then sort out their progressively more complicated relationship with their daughter as well as their own biases against African-Americans in 1960s America. Simply put, the play suffers from thematic inconsistency: from the direction to the performances and even the wardrobe, the show tries and fails to make the production simultaneously a contemporary criticism of racial dynamics in America and a unique cultural product of the ’60s.

The acting falters when the show strays away from being comedic. Even the romance, which is supposed to drive the majority of the plot in the show, feels flat and unbelievable. There’s a moment in the production when Joanna and Prentice play a game of hide-and-go-seek onstage. The entire sequence feels uncomfortable instead of spontaneous and romantic—cloying instead of genuinely emotional. It’s especially disappointing to see Warner fall short of a great performance, considering his top-billed status and how prominently he has been displayed in the show’s promotional material. Perhaps due to his co-star, who stands out as the weakest link in this cast, the relationship between the two characters feels hollow.

Beyond the romance, the drama of the play feels unsatisfying as well due to a lack of emotional conviction. The cast’s inconsistent ability to bring the material to life only emphasizes this shortcoming. In one of the few moving scenes in the play, Matt Dayton rants about his fears about his daughter’s safety if she marries Prentice. Lyman’s performance was intense and passionate as well as emphasized the amount of worry—not anger—that dominates Matt Dayton’s thoughts. In comparison, scenes like when Joanna Dayton confronts her parents about their internalized racism, or when Warner’s father admonishes his son for dating a white woman, feel comparatively stale and flat. Whereas Lyman shows a breadth of complex emotions in a heartfelt monologue, Warner and Forlenza deliver monotonous, dry speeches, making their scenes more often overtly didactic than heartfelt.

There is an inherent challenge to performing and directing this play. On one hand, there is a need to perform it as it was done in 1967, paying homage to the source material. On the other hand, the show also stands as a useful tool for understanding our own contemporary social problems: perhaps shifting the show to a more contemporary tone could have helped make the play much more universal. However, the show did not balance these two directorial choices.

Instead of complementing the source material, the contemporary moments of the production only undermine the significance of rest of the play, which was an obvious product of a different era. The play may be almost 50 years old, but the production should not have made that fact so readily apparent. Instead of making the show seem relevant to today’s racial issues, the modern touches only highlight how removed the show is from the problems of the ’60s. The play presents itself as a product of that time, constantly referencing Nixon and the Vietnam War. Yet the production uses the era as a source of inspiration rather than a grounding, ideological force. The play attempts to de-emphasize the 1960s by furnishing the stage with objects that could come from the decade but also could easily be from any number of decades. Instead of giving the play a well-defined time and place, the environment seems bland and too muted.

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was not offensively bad, but it was decidedly average, both in its performances and its direction, and gave an inconsistent interpretation of a show that is really beginning to show its age.