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Losing hand played out with folding 'Gin Game'
(by Bob Ableman - April 25, 2012)
THEATER, BY BOB ABELMAN
Losing hand played out with folding 'Gin Game'
On the surface, D.L. Coburn's "The Gin Game" is a simple, four-scene play about two people in their twilight years playing cards at a rundown nursing home. There is, of course, so much more to this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, but none of it is realized in the current Chagrin Valley Little Theatre production.
This play is built in layers. When Fonsia Dorsey first meets and is cajoled into playing gin with Weller Martin, he saves her from the melancholy of being a new resident, and she rescues him from residents he deems too old, too sick and too dull. As they become companions and increasingly disclose about their lives, their true natures progressively rise to the surface. His cantankerous charm gives way to impatience and then pent-up frustration and bitter rage. Her proper and conservative facade erodes to reveal a subtle but eventually maddening needling.
In this CVLT production, featuring Linda Ryan, as Fonsia, and Steve Ryan, as Weller, there are no layers, there is no progression, and no revelation occurs.
The preview night performances of these actors were flat from the start and remained that way to the finish. Their characters' unrelenting psychological battle is little more than tepid exchanges, and their careless card playing does little to facilitate the rhythms so important to this play. Little is done to inspire the comedy that is peppered throughout the script or justify Fonsia's comments that Weller has a "sarcastic streak" and "wonderful sense of humor." Even less rouses or sustains the play's drama.
"The Gin Game's" pedigree should have alerted Eric Oswald to the complexities that lie beneath the seemingly simple storyline and informed his direction. After all, the 1977 Broadway production starred the legendary Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy and garnered Tony Award nominations for best play, best actor, best actress and best director. In 1997, the play was revived on Broadway, starring Charles Durning and Julie Harris, and was nominated for a Tony Award for best production of a revival. Cleveland royalty Reuben and Dorothy Silver were in the 1994 and 2001 Ensemble Theater productions.
Clearly, this is not just a simple play about two people playing cards, and Mr. Oswald barely scratches the surface in the CVLT production of it.
The Ryans are certainly capable of better work, as their performances in last year's CVLT production of "Bloody Murder" attests. And perhaps this production of "The Gin Game" will find more substantial footing with each performance. Currently, however, it is playing a losing hand.
"The Gin Game" continues through May 5 at the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre's River Street Playhouse, 56 River St., Chagrin Falls. For tickets, which are $10, call 440-247-8955.
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