Table Settings

Written & Directed by James Lapine

Table Settings is a wildly funny comedy is about three generations of a Jewish family. All the fast-paced action takes place around an all-purpose dining table; sometimes a restaurant table, and other times the dining table of a Jewish mother to end all Jewish mothers. Other characters include an exceedingly irreverent younger son, his martini-swilling older brother who is married to a shiksa, and the older brother's two kids. Table Settings, a highly acclaimed and long-running Off Broadway success, is an hysterical look at an American family.

Table Settings (Workshop)

Written & Directed by James Lapine

Playwrights Horizons
March 21, 1979 - April 1, 1979

Table Settings (Off-Broadway)

Written & Directed by James Lapine

Playwrights Horizons
January 14, 1980 - August 31, 1980

Photos by Martha Swope

Reviews & Features

“Last season, Mr. Lapine gave us an imaginative translation onto the stage of Gertrude Stein's happily fragmented poem Photograph. It was an abstract, disciplined work, but the playfulness kept spilling through. Table Settings, which is being performed in a workshop version at Playwrights Horizons, is a series of basically naturalistic sketches set out in a series of skewed rhythms and ellipses that give them an absurd cast. The skits are fragments from the life of a typical, comfortably placed and endlessly displaced middle‐class family.

Richard Eder for The New York Times, 1979