Giants Jones, Tyson deal for ‘Gin Game’
Actors put their cards on the table for story about aging
A new revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winnng play The
Gin Game marks the first time James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson have shared a Broadway stage in nearly 50 years. But don’t tell them that.
“It was 1966? Are you kidding me?” Tyson asks, when reminded that was the year she and Jones appeared in A Hand Is On the
Gate, a play showcasing African-American poetry and music. “That’s a long time ago.”
Jones, 84, and Tyson, 90, had worked together off-Broadway before Hands, and have teamed in a couple of TV and film projects since. Shortly after Tyson wrapped her Tony Award-winning performance in a 2013 revival of
The Trip to Bountiful, she was approached by producer Bill Haber, who dangled Jones’ name. “He had asked me about The
Gin Game a long time ago,” Tyson recalls, chatting with Jones in a small dressing room she uses backstage at the Golden Theatre, where the production is in previews for an opening Wednesday. “This time he said, ‘Are you going to do the play or not?’ I said, ‘What play?’ He told me, and I said, ‘You still have that?’ Then he said that James wanted to do it, too, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting. That could be attractive.’ ”
The D.L. Coburn play, which premiered on Broadway in 1977 with stars Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy — Tyson saw that staging, and remembers being “mesmerized” —follows two residents at a “home for the aged,” as the stage directions describe it. The play opens on visiting day, and neither Jones’ character, Weller Martin, nor Tyson’s, Fonsia Dorsey, has callers. Weller suggests they play gin rummy; as they do so, they discuss their lives, and Fonsia reveals a surprising affinity for the card game.
“She magically wins,” says twotime Tony winner Jones, grinning. “She finds her strength. She’s in deep despair, in this home for the first time. My character is a predator, frankly. He’s obsessed with gin and sees her as a partner. He knows it’s an important day, visitors’ day, and he has somehow abandoned his family and doesn’t have any visitors, and sees that she doesn’t either.”
When Fonsia meets Weller, Tyson says, “I’m a little suspicious. I’ve been at this place for three weeks, with no husband, no son, no grandchildren. Then I find that this man is rather charming, and he can make me laugh, bring me a little happiness. I think, ‘ Something can happen here.’ ”
Indeed, when Fonsia enters for the second scene, a week later, her hair is set and she has put on makeup, and Weller wears a jacket and tie. There’s a romantic component: “You always have that, no matter how old you are,” Jones says. “That’s instinctive in people, to look for companionship. Because life is lonely.”
Jones believes that Weller fears age-related dementia. The actor recalls visiting his own father, Robert Earl Jones, also an actor, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in New Jersey, shortly before the elder Jones died. “He was a big man, with a certain fierceness about him,” Jones says. “And that’s all I saw. I remember thinking, ‘ He doesn’t know who I am, but what does he think of me?’ It was scary.”
Tyson notes, “I tell my daughter, ‘ The moment I look at you and ask what your name is, pull the plug. I’m outta here.’ Because I don’t want to be here if I don’t have my mind. Oh, Lord have mercy, I cannot imagine that.”
Though Tyson and Jones are the first black actors to appear in a Broadway production of Gin
Game, neither feels that race enters into the production. “They’ve inserted some religious music that might be more heard in the black community, but that’s all,” says Tyson.
“I don’t care what race you are — if you live long enough, you’re going to go through what happens” in the play, Tyson says. “It’s the cycle of life. You’re born and you live, and then you’re going to die.”