At the dinner table, family members come together to share the events of the day.
They eat, talk, laugh, love, learn and grow.
Highlighting some of those changes is “The Big Meal,” which opens Feb. 20 at Steel Beam Theatre in St. Charles and runs through March 15. Showtimes are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays.
“It’s a beautifully written play by Dan LeFranc that chronicles the history of a family, essentially at the dinner table,” Director Bernie Weiler said.
Nine actors play multiple roles from a story that begins with the meeting of a young couple — Sam and Nicole — at a restaurant and then chronicles the generations from first kiss to final goodbye.
After the young couple meet, get married and mature into an older couple, their roles are handed off to older actors. As the couple continues to age, the younger actors become other sets of children as the generations go by.
“It all happens before your eyes,” Weiler said. “If you blink, you will see new actors playing the roles … aging characters.”
Written by LeFranc — who also writes for recent Golden Globe winning drama “The Affair” — the play demands “an attentive audience that has a broad imagination,” Weiler said, as the years pass by.
“The language of the play, in the center of it, takes care of all of that. So, there’s very little in the way of costume changes,” he said. “None of the theatrical conventions assist in the transition. But the play is just remarkably well structured.”
In the times he has seen the play produced, the audience did not have any trouble keeping up with the transitions, he said.
“It’s seamless in the way that it occurs and that it is structured,” Weiler said. “And you really get the point of each change and transition.”
Many times in the rehearsal process, the actors commented on how the writing of the play takes the audience through the transitions and years, he said.
“It is just a stunningly beautiful conversation that I think everybody will recognize as having occurred in their family at one time or another. And one of the interesting things about it is, I’ve never had a cast that was so interested and intrigued and engaged in the project. Every one of the cast is just taken with what an incredible piece of writing the script is,” he said. “We’re having a ball preparing for it. We’ve got some really gifted actors completely enthralled with the project. It should be a good experience.”
While very challenging for the actors, Weiler said he has not had one complaint from the cast, which is “so committed to this work that they just work and work and work…”
“It is very challenging for the actors,” Weiler said. “It’s been fun in rehearsals, because right in the middle of it an actor will say ‘now, who am I?’ So, we’ve been having a lot of fun with that.”
The one-act play runs about 85 minutes, and is appropriate for teens and older. It is a drama, but one that’s “got an awful lot of comic relief in it,” Weiler said. “And there’s some significant dramatic moments.
“It kinds of plumbs the depth of family relationships and how they develop and how they disappoint in the course of the lifetime of a family,” he said.
LeFranc has “done a masterful job of understanding the nature and tempo of conversations that happen at the dinner table,” Weiler said. “So the structure of those conversations is such that, if there are four characters on stage, there’s actually two or three conversations going on….
“The demand of having that occur in a natural way is very taxing on the actor. But, it’s just beautifully written, and it’s realistic,” Weiler said. “And watching it, you can say ‘yes, that’s how dinnertime sounds in my family.'”
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“The Big Meal”
When: Feb. 20-March 15
Where: Steel Beam Theatre, 111 W. Main St., St. Charles
Tickets: $23-28
Information: 630-587-8521 or steelbeamtheatre.com