The Gin Game: Lives Played and Played Out
Auditorium on Waller Creek,
through March 17
Running Time: 1 hr, 50 min
It’s visiting day at the Bentley Nursing and Convalescent Home, but Weller Martin has no visitors. Instead, he retreats to the sun porch, where he plays solitaire — that is, until he is joined by Fonsia Dorsey. Fonsia is new to the home and doesn’t know Weller, but being the only two on the porch, they engage each other in conversation, feeling each other out. Weller, aged as he is, seems like a solid citizen, funny and outgoing. Fonsia is more reticent, more inner-directed, the nice, unassuming old lady next door. Eventually, Weller invites Fonsia to join him in a game of gin rummy. Weller’s an old hand at the game, and he approaches it with confident bluster, but while Fonsia has played before, she needs some helpful hints to get her going. She does, however, manage to win the first hand. She also wins the second. And the third. In fact, she always wins. Always. And the more they play, the more frustrated Weller becomes. The more they play, the more they let slip about who they are and what they believe. The more they play, both literally and figuratively, the more cards get laid on the table.
D. L. Coburn won a Pulitzer Prize for this play in 1978, and this Onstage Theatre Company production manages to do it justice, which is no small feat. On its surface, it’s a simple tale, but Coburn uses the game of cards as a metaphor for lives already lived, played, and played out. What we believe at the beginning is certainly not what we believe at the end. We are, in fact, manipulated in the way only a truly fine story can — we make our realizations at the same time the characters make theirs. In a way, the play is like a good mystery, but without a body or a detective or a culprit — a mystery of the human heart.
Credit for the success of the production must go to director Robert Tolaro and his effective cast. Tolaro sits the actors down for much of the play and lets them deliver the text, and a better decision he could not possibly have made. (In fact, the less effective moments in the play are almost always when he has the actors on their feet moving around.) Tolaro’s actors are Richard Craig and Lana Dieterich, and both prove up to the task of presenting Coburn’s multilayered tale, in both small ways and large. While each does effective work, Craig’s stands out. An old rule in comedy is that you should avoid telling the same joke three times in a night, but he manages to tell the same joke more than half a dozen times and still draw laughs, which requires impeccable timing and focus. More than his comic sensibility, he also takes the roof off the building when the role calls for it, and in this Dieterich matches him blow for blow, especially so during their final game of gin, when both reveal more than either they, or we, really wanted or perhaps, needed to know.
If two people sitting around playing cards can hold your attention for the better part of two hours, something special is happening. I saw the play with a group of 16 on a Saturday night. I’ve recently seen some, sorry to say, downright sloppy theatre here in Austin that played to almost full houses. This play and this production of it deserve a larger audience.
This article appears in February 15 • 2002.