Card party

Harris and Durning win at The Gin Game

by Carolyn Clay

THE GIN GAME, By D. L. Coburn. Directed by Charles Nelson Reilly. Set design by James Noone. Costumes by Noel Taylor. Lighting by Kirk Bookman. Sound by T. Richard Fitzgerald. With Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The National Actors Theatre production, at the Wilbur Theatre through May 16.

Everyone's a loser in The Gin Game -- except, of course, the audience if the actors play their cards right. And the estimable Julie Harris and Charles Durning, like Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn before them, are thespians at the top of their game. D.L. Coburn's Pulitzer Prize winner about two fraying oldsters in a fraying old-age home who face off and reach out over a tourney of gin rummy is no masterpiece. But as Harold Clurman, quoting W.H. Auden, opined when Coburn's cards were first shuffled, by the Cronyns, in 1977: masterpieces are for high holidays. On lesser occasions, lesser works, lovingly performed, will do. And The Gin Game, as played by Harris and Durning, does well enough to be a treat.

Durning is Weller Martin, an irascible Type A personality nursing his bad heart in a place for which he has complete contempt. The nursing home, he barks, "is a warehouse for the emotionally and intellectually dead"; he is the part of it "that's breathing." Five-time Tony winner Harris is Fonsia Dorsey, a newcomer to the home, obviously unhappy and -- in Harris's reading -- as nervous as a chicken at a foxes' convention. On the cluttered porch of the facility, Weller entices Fonsia to a game of gin that turns into a dance as sad as age and loneliness and as inevitable as Oedipus Rex. It seems the passive-aggressive Fonsia just can't lose at Weller's game -- and he can neither deal with that nor walk away.

Or, in the case of this production, dance away. Apparently at Harris's suggestion, Coburn has written 10 pages of new dialogue culminating in a waltz turn around the porch for the couple that's intended to showcase the terpsichorean nimbleness of Queen of the Stardust Ballroom star (and recent Theatre Hall of Fame inductee) Durning. It's a sweet sequence, and the big man is uncommonly light on his feet. But it's also a key to Harris's and Durning's approach to the material, which is more sentimental than that of the flintier Tandy and Cronyn. Tandy's rendition of the controlling and vindictive Fonsia was harder-edged and less charming than Harris's. And I will never forget how red Cronyn's face became when Weller flew into a rage; it was truly horrifying to watch. On the other hand, the stunned dignity with which Durning's Weller greets the stroke toward which he has been headed all evening is pretty chilling too.

But God, they say, is in the details. So it is with fine acting, and with these two you don't need a crowd. In fact, one of the joys of Charles Nelson Reilly's (a tad too funny) production is its confidence in the ability of its stars to engage. The curtain goes up on Durning's Weller amid the dead leaves and other detritus of the porch. And before a distraught Fonsia flutters on in her autumnal wrapper, the actor is given his head to demonstrate the character's comical yet touching frailty at length, before anything is heard but an off-stage TV and a burst of traffic noise.

Once the gin game is under way, Durning betrays his character's excitement and his compulsion in multitudinous ways -- the strained smiles, the snatched cards, the myriad agitated variations on his little one-one-two-two dealing ritual. The porridge-voiced Harris, for her part, is all bemused concentration as she squints at her cards over dangling glasses, gracefully waves away flies, talks or sings to herself. Her self-protective Fonsia cannot even flee for her life without collecting her open purse before she skitters. And the way in which her choppy sobs teeter on laughter is a nice touch.

Moreover, Harris and Durning are engaged in a pas de deux worthy of ballet. The two trade quite consciously on the difference in their sizes, Durning capitalizing on his girth to underline Weller's volatility while Harris hunches and folds her arms in on her chest to make Fonsia seem even smaller. At first, it's like watching a bird and a buffalo. Which makes the more startling our realization that Fonsia's rigidity is at least as much to blame as Weller's apoplexy for the pair's inability to throw aside the cards and -- as E.M. Forster would say -- "only connect."

When The Gin Game, directed by Mike Nichols, first hit the boards, the production was so deft that the play was overrated. I don't believe I've seen The Gin Game since it passed through the Wilbur 22 years ago, en route to Broadway, then returned there, on tour, a year later. And truth to tell, I don't much care if I do again, unless it's to rejoice in performances as ace as these. Few actors would dare, even years later, to slide into the slippers and supp-hose of the Cronyns. But for Harris and Durning, the shoes fit, and they wear the funny-poignant hell out of them.