‘The Gin Game’ Is No Theatrical Tonic

Some Pulitzer Prize-winning plays don’t age as well as others. When “The Gin Game,” D.L. Coburn’s study of two senior citizens who meet in a nursing home, premiered on Broadway in 1977, a year before winning that honor, it starred no less formidable a duo than Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, by then considered the first couple of American theater. In the years since, it has been a showcase for powerhouse performers of a certain vintage, among them Charles Durning and Julie Harris, and James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson.Yet in its latest incarnation, at Soho’s Housing Works Bookstore, this vehicle, like its characters, shows marked signs of rust. Like the original New York staging, this intimate “Game” brings together accomplished players who have long been partners offstage: Debra Winger, the three-time Oscar nominee whose many memorable films include “Terms of Endearment” and “Shadowlands,” is paired with her husband, Arliss Howard, a stage and screen veteran who has worked with celebrated directors ranging from Steven Spielberg to The New Group’s Scott Elliott.Here Mr. Howard and Ms. Winger are guided by David Blum, who before getting involved in theater as a producer and editor enjoyed a prolific career in journalism; perhaps most famously, he penned “Hollywood’s Brat Pack,” the 1985 New York Magazine article that coined that term for a generation of new stars including Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. (Mr. Blum was also a contributor to The New York Sun.)The small performance area provided by their venue, far from Broadway, sits, ironically, in front of the famous bookstore’s Young Adults section, where scenic designer Ashley Basile has fashioned a simple facsimile of a porch. A comfortable-looking but modest bench — this senior center is hardly supposed to be luxurious — sits next to the table where Mr. Howard’s Weller Martin and Ms. Winger’s Fonsia Dorsey will duke it out over increasingly heated rounds of gin rummy. The metaphor is obvious: In life, as in card games, we are forced to play the hands we’re dealt, though how we manage them can also be relevant. Fonsia seems to have the intrinsically sunnier disposition of the two characters, even if, as we’ll soon learn, it has been tested by hard experience and essential abandonment. Divorced for many years, she has a sister and a grown son, but neither ever visit her.Weller is equally unpopular, with two sons and a daughter who ignore him, and you can’t blame them for staying away. Surly and cynical, he grouses about having chosen the wrong business partner, though he’s generally more focused on his card, particularly as Fonsia, who insists she hasn’t played for years, keeps casually and soundly beating him.To modern audiences, Weller may suggest what happens when toxic masculinity meets cognitive decline; even some of the less spicy insults he hurls when defeated, appalling the relatively prim and proper Fonsia, make it plain that for this geezer, losing to a woman is especially hard. Scowling and moving creakily with a cane, Mr. Howard delivers a performance suitable for a horror movie, in which Grandpa turns into an ogre, eventually knocking down the table and chairs.The problem is that this monster won’t accept his victim’s surrender. As Fonsia tries to avoid Weller’s repeated demands to play another game, always failing in this pursuit, their interaction increasingly evokes an abusive relationship. Watching the wryly expressive Ms. Winger study her cards at a recent preview, I almost found myself flinching in anticipation of her announcing that she had won again, knowing what she’d be in for.“Gin Game” hasn’t stuck around this long for nothing, of course; there are flashes of insight and poignance even amid the ugliest moments. “I guess we just lived too long, Fonsia,” Weller muses, shortly after playing perhaps his cruelest trick on her. Perhaps Mr. Howard and Ms. Winger, whom I trust get along a lot better in real life than their characters do here, are finding some catharsis in this emotional torture; as a viewer, I certainly did not.

‘The Gin Game’ Is No Theatrical Tonic

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