Grace (Sharon Ferguson, center) admonishes her daughter Carolyn (Eva Vint, left) while, in another era, Ellie (Amy Katrina) works on a term paper in “The Dining Room,” a Dolphin Players production at Southwestern Oregon Community College. World Photos by Madeline Steege

COOS BAY — They have maids.

Their kids go to boarding schools.

They’re unfailingly polite but not exactly nice.

And of course, they always eat in the dining room.

A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room” examines the cultural significance of the dining room among upper and upper-middle class East Coast WASPs in the 20th century. The play, a Dolphin Players production directed by Alice Carlson, opens tonight at Southwestern Oregon Community College’s Hales Center for the Performing Arts.

The play offers an expansive variety of perspectives on the room’s meaning — and life in general for members of this class — through 61 characters in about 20 vignettes, with time periods varying from the 1930s to the present.

For many characters of the 1970s and beyond, the sight of an antique dining table surrounded by six ornately carved chairs evokes feelings of nostalgia for families spending time together. Others recoil at the authoritarian codes of conduct embodied by the furniture.

As parents so often instruct children in the play, there are a number of rules associated with the dining room: No one can begin eating until everyone has arrived. No one can leave until everyone has finished. Entrances and exits must be graceful and orderly. Everyone must sit in an assigned seat dictated by his or her place in the family hierarchy. Courses must be eaten and utensils used in the proper order. Engaging in pleasant conversation is required of all, and efforts to maintain it must persist despite any uncomfortable circumstances.

But between the 1950s and the 1990s, these practices and the usage of dining rooms gradually diminished and almost disappeared. Many of the families depicted in the play confront stages of this transition, while others live under the protocols of the dining room when the regime was in full force.

 In an early scene set in the ’30s, Father (Robert Marchant) reads a newspaper over breakfast alone at the table until children Lizzie (Sharon Ferguson) and Charlie (Jeff Heilbronn) ask if they can sit at the table. Father reminds them to sit up straight and proceeds to correct their grammar or usage almost every time they speak, until becoming involved in a political conversation with Charlie about how the New Deal will ruin the country.

When Charlie complains about arriving consistently late for school, Father becomes offended that a lowly teacher would suggest he shouldn’t linger over his breakfast as long as he likes before taking his son to school. Then Mother (Aaren Tucker) comes to the table, placing her order of poached eggs with Annie (Eva Vint).

Shifting a few decades later, husband and wife Howard (Heilbronn) and Ellie (Amy Katrina) argue over Ellie setting up her typewriter at the dining room table to work on her term paper. Like most of the play’s conservative men, Howard believes the table and all its accoutrements should be preserved in pristine condition, becoming apoplectic at Ellie’s lack of reverence in sullying it.

“It just sits here!” Ellie screams. “It’s never used!”

Going back in time, there’s another argument between Grace (Ferguson) and her daughter Carolyn (Vint), who wants to skip dance class and go to the theater with her Aunt Martha. Even if she can’t go, Carolyn would like to get out of dance, which bewilders Grace, whose argument is essentially that any deviation from the plan she’s laid out for her daughter’s life will result in chaos and misery.

The three scenes intermingle, with Mother remaining at the table waiting for her eggs during the first part of Howard and Ellie’s argument, and Ellie continuing at her typewriter while Grace and Carolyn spar.

Next, during World War II, a child named Michael (Justin McCarley) begs Aggie (Tucker), the family’s Irish maid, to stay with them instead of leaving for a better job. There’s at least mention of a maid in almost every scene, and the Anglo names serve as a reminder of the time period. In seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls,” Richard and Emily had a different maid in almost every episode, always with a foreign name.

When Nick (Heilbronn) asks his Grandfather (Chris Stone) to pay for boarding school, Grandfather pretends to ask his maid (Ferguson) her opinion, though all she ever says is “Yes, sir.”

As the play progresses, the patriarchal structure of the play’s families becomes central, seeming inscribed in the geometry of the table, as every father figure occupies the same seat. These are men who will spend more time dictating how their drinks must be made and served than it would take to get it for themselves, without considering an alternative to being served. They justify making everyone wait to eat while they deal with an insult on the grounds that all members of the household are subsumed by the man’s identity and therefore equally injured.

The dining room is where this culture expresses its thoroughly ordered nature, and that depends on the role of the father in enforcing its rules and taboos. It’s that relationship that inspires the divergent emotional responses to the same old table and chairs.