THE GIN GAME: SADNESS AND LONELINESS
There’s more than one way of coming at a Pulitzer Prize play.
Just ask director David Mallis. His softer, less vitriolic look at D.L. Coburn’s ultimately sad little “The Gin Game” builds slowly and smartly into a troubled look at two lonely losers. Ensconced in a rundown nursing home, they retreat to the back porch to avoid the condescending eyes of visitors, as well as those dreadful local choirs that sing soul-saving hymns in the common room.
Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin are in many ways rejects of life. Her son never comes to visit. His family stays away for very good reasons.
It’s a play about loneliness, repressed anger and the notion these two are in life’s waiting room, facing their mortality pretty much alone.
Weller, a crusty old man, cajoles Fonsia, a bit of a dried-up prune of a woman, to while away the boredom by playing rounds of gin rummy. At first these two are almost comical, with him doing his little singsong as he deals the cards; her making an adventure of picking just the right card from the discard pile to get gin in the bat of an eye.
But things turn nasty. The game becomes too important to Weller, probably to Fonsia too. The undercurrent of tension that defines this erstwhile relationship is palpable and the revelations of each of these sad souls turn vicious.
It is these darker tones that make “The Gin Game” something more than a comedy sketch about old folks at home, in this case in the Bentley Nursing Home.
Neither character is truly likable, yet like them we must for the play to work. That’s where vulnerability comes in. Though Fonsia and Weller can both be cruel, there’s something about their disturbing sadness that makes us listen to their natter for the two hours of Coburn’s play.
Sometimes they make each other laugh. Sometimes you can almost believe that in a different time and place they might be soulmates. That’s the seduction of this two-hander. It isn’t about gin at all, but rather about the sadness of wasted lives.
Judi Skinner, looking a tad too young and pretty, and an appropriately weathered Tom Levely navigate a tricky terrain in Coburn’s play. Sometimes they’re like zaftig old vaudevillians dancing through minefields of possible disaster. Sometimes they’re like repressed human husks, struggling for some last shreds of dignity.
There are cavils. Skinner can be a tad too bubbly, too flirtatious and open.
Levely has moments that are a tad too soft, suggesting warmth and sadness where Weller ought to be more grim and mean.
No matter, each gives a splendid performance
and together they create stage chemistry that is enticing.
Director David Mallis has lightened the play, perhaps a little too much, in the first act. Yet, by the final threatening scene he allows his actors to unleash the vitriol. You better be prepared for the anger and hostility that finally rushes to the surface here as Mallis turns up the heat, giving Coburn’s play its devastating final moments.
In the end, Mallis’s slow burn of a production does just what this play should do. He may come at it less angrily but he still turns the comedy here on its head, leaving us understanding life isn’t always about happy endings.
A battered old porch of a set (by Levely) is a metaphor for the worn-out waste of life. Here a ripped screen; there a toppled chair. Like the people in this play these battered old remnants, now tucked sadly into corners, suggest the detritus of time. They make us remember Grandma’s attic and the stored paraphernalia of the past. They make us understand Tennessee Williams’ sad reminder that we’re all fighting the enemy: time.
Gary Smith has written about theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 35 years.