We’re finally here. It’s finally autumn. The wind is picking up, the days getting colder, the leaves slowly becoming yellow and brittle. The jittering excitement of fall football looms in the air everyday. But fall doesn’t mean football and leaves changing color and cold to everyone. To some people, fall means that it’s time to put on a show.

Annually, for the last eight years, PV has been putting on fall plays and spring musicals, directed and produced by Mr. Tom Lupfer and Mrs. Merielle Lupfer, and they have run the gamut of genres. This fall’s play, “The Dining Room,” is different still.

“Our audience has enjoyed a variety of styles of plays in the past few years,” Tom Lupfer said. “PV Theatre has recently taken on modern comedy (with “Don’t Drink the Water”) , Shakespeare (with “Romeo and Juliet”), and interview-based drama (with “The Laramie Project”).  This play is something entirely different.”

The casting for “The Dining Room” by A.U. Gurney has already been decided and rehearsals are underway. The cast and crew are working furiously to make this unique show as good as it can be by Thursday Nov. 20, the first of four performances.

The show takes place in a dining room (obviously, as if the title doesn’t give that away) and is  “set up in a series of vignettes,” said senior Tyler Halligan, a notable member of the company. “Therefore the audience gets different glimpses of certain characters, making our jobs more enjoyable and the viewing experience more enjoyable.”

So, it’s not a single show so much as it is a series of skits (call them vignettes if you want to be fancy about it) that just so happen to take place in similar locations. Therefore, there isn’t a unified plot per se, but there is a focus. It centers around the lives of people very much like you or me, living a good life in a good house.

“For the cast, this play is a chance to practice all the acting skills that go into creating vivid characters,” said Tom Lupfer. “They’re being challenged to take their physicality, vocal abilities, and text interpretation to the next level.”

Students will be playing several different characters for several different skits and the roles will range from senile grandparents to little children to whiny teenagers.

“It’s interesting to be able to play several different characters,” said Calvin Rezen, another prominent member of the PV theatre. “It should be interesting for the audience since it’s about the upper white middle class, much like the majority of the people who will see it.”

Since there are few roles and many people, not everyone will play the same role every night nor will they act alongside the same cast every night. Each of the four shows will have differing actors, all of whom bring something new to the scene.

“Different performances will have different combinations of actors, so no two performances will be the same,” Tom Lupfer said.

With the fall play underway, the cast is simultaneously amping up for the spring musical. The musical is to be Anything Goes, set on a boat in the 1930’s. There’ll be Cole Porter and a whole lot of tap dancing.  The first showing of “Anything Goes” will be on Thursday, March 19th.

Performances of The Dining Room:

Thursday, Nov. 20 at 7 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 21 at 7 p.m.

Sat., Nov. 22 at 1 p.m. & 7 p.m.