A sophisticated dinner party leads guests to reveal their deepest fears and desires

The dinner party on stage at the Variety Arts theater is too witty to be anything but satire: yet the dialogue, smart as it sometimes is, pitches itself between a big game hunt and trivial pursuit. We certainly recognize ourselves in the assorted types: Roger, the opinionated, popular novelist, perhaps a Tom Clancy, who also is a loud mouthed defender of American capitalism (Phillip Clark); a soft spoken, scholarly expert on the Middle East called Khalid, perhaps an Edward Said (Edward A Hajj); the nominal feminist Lydia (Jenny Bacon), also a vegan (she eats nothing that had a face); the nearly silent, good looking fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor); the Black preacher, Julia (Melanna Gray); the deliciously dim, eager hostess, Suzie, a Martha Stewart type (Kristine Nielsen). They gather in malice and high self regard not for the food, though the hostess holds forth on the ingredients of every dish, but for the chance to show off their urban insider views. That given, there's a surprisingly small amount of blood drawn by their darts at each other. Tension builds up higher with each course served until it breaks out, during the creme brulee (!), in fist fighting between the two big talkers, the novelist and the journalist (Dean Nolen).

Playwrights Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros aim to reveal the savagery, fear, and self loathing just beneath the social skin of these people. In a language shaped by life in our "Modern Industrial Entertainment Complex," they either pontificate or take each other down over money, real estate, vandalism, virtue, war (bad), justice (try and get it), and stereotypical behavior of every variety. The hostess, apologetic about her wealth, empathizes with her guests since she too was once middle class like them. Her money apparently never bought taste, for we learn that her bathroom approximates the size of a swimming pool with amber floors and mirrors. None of them notice their own vulgarity. Julia may be a preacher, but since in the popular wisdom her Blackness means she's got rhythm, she is coaxed into performing a perfectly hideous rendition of a popular song off key. The novelist benumbs all minds on and off stage with speechifying on the issue, "Why peace?", the number one fantasy of our time.

The action hinges on the imminence of chaos. Things begin to come undone when the beautiful vegan, after a discreet fit of nausea, explains that she's pregnant by an unknown man. The information disturbs their imagined social order. Chaos itself edges in when the hostess's mystery guest appears, a young Arab, Mohammed (Amir Arison), She gushes over him like a hero, while he, aggressive, outspoken, a self proclaimed terrorist, excites the Palestinian and the Jew into increasingly violent argument and brawling over Mid East politics. When they in turn taunt the Arab as a war lover, he attacks Americans for deliberately killing thousands in the World Trade Center accident, no accident in his view. Still, polemics are not quite the point, nor is indicting America and Americans. The dialogue's thrust and counter-thrust indicate that boundaries between moral right and wrong have eroded so far these people can no longer distinguish between terrorism and heroism. They are, for the most part, deeply oblivious of each other. At the same time, the play brings post 9/11 attitudes to the forefront of the audience's awareness.

What "Omnium Gatherum" needs is a dusting of cogency to clinch its many merits-- many good lines, several good characters, a few good ideas–unify these and shine them up to a gloss. When the Arab, eating voraciously as if for all the starving countries in the third world, announces in the play's final ten minutes that he died in an airplane crash, he derails the play's fragile coherence. The news comes from nowhere in the action up to this juncture. So they all must be in hell; Aha! The idea is reinforced by the simple fixed set, a long dining table at which the omnium gather, creating an illusion of social ease in contrast to the increasingly ominous boom of planes overhead. A final, thundering crash freeze frames the attendees, sends the table dropping through the floor and releases a hail of dust, bits of debris and paper falling and falling until they cover the stage. We are caught in 9/11 replaying around us as it will replay in the principals' consciousness down eternity.