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How odd that a play titled “The Dining Room” manages to leave the audience full but not satisfied, even as it runs to 18 scenes and stretches six actors through the paces of 57 characters.

Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Myers opened a three-week run of the A.R. Gurney work before of a packed house Thursday. The play, which won Gurney a Pulitzer in 1985, is a series of unrelated vignettes staged in the dining room of an upper-middle-class WASP home.

What the play means to do is illustrate the gradual decline of the family as the dining room becomes less and less a center of the American life. Its place taken by the kitchen, the living room and the world outside. Scenes flow silently from one to the other: The action of one starting before the other has ended and actors sometimes exiting stage left only to enter stage right as a different character.

Although this is a popular and oft-performed play, it’s not surprising that, in the constant shifting, the message is murky at best, depending more on the knowledge of what the playwright is trying to say than any sort of continuing narrative carried from scene to scene.

Still, the whole thing is a highly entertaining and eminently watchable dead end. Ultimately, the play is an academic examination of high WASP culture and its sense of entitlement and ennui. The drama comes in second.

It’s left to the actors to put their stamp on the work, and with an abundance of chances, everyone gets the opportunity to shine.

The play’s loudest moments — a screaming father, an angry architect, an insulted brother, a querulous grandfather — speak to the truths of WASP culture and the angry little boys who grow up to be men. Yet, the real delight is in the women — the repressed Stepford wives who morph from the wives and maids of the Depression to the teenagers, lesbian mothers and philandering housewives of the ’80s. The best turn in subtle performances.

Nancy Antonio propels her elegant frame through a series of scenes with a quiet grace that leaves the audience aching as she and her married lover plan a future and discard it over the course of her children’s birthday party. Then she turns on a dime to don punk leathers and mix up a lethal cocktail of gin, vodka, Fresca and boys for an afternoon of teenage partying.

Christine Kobie and J. Mitchell Haley sparked in an innuendo-laden scene set in, around and underneath the dining room table. Both knew how to deliver the lines and appropriate gestures to make the scene pop without seeming sleazy. Kobie also had some excellent background work in a throwaway role as a narcoleptic maid, while Haley’s sharp-tongued psychiatrist pried some long-buried patriarchal issues out of a contractor who wanted to remodel his dining room.

Notes for the play go into some detail about the furniture, lighting and props — all of which are critical in creating an upper middle class atmosphere. Theatre Conspiracy’s not-quite-a-shoestring-budget notwithstanding, the set seemed rather shabby (if not downright boring) and a long, long way from the elegant world of John Updike. The wide variety of costumes was a nice touch, but the focus should have been on the dining room, not the diners.

The show is interesting and the cast does a terrific job of bringing a huge number of characters to life, but the nontraditional structure of the story isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

We never had a dining room. Then again, we weren't WASPs either. E-mail me at csilk@naplesnews.com.