House of cards

The Gin Game's engaging table talk

by Bill Rodriguez

By D.L. Coburn. Directed by Harland Meltzer. At the Colonial Theatre through July 27.

You can think of D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game as the legitimate theater version of a professional wrestling match. It's entertaining, with lots of snorting and bellowing and an unbelievable amount of bouncing back after the same punishing blow. But you know that, in the end, they'll both walk away relatively unharmed.

The two-person comedy is being performed at Colonial Theatre by the married acting team of Nikki Bruno and Arthur "Bucky" Walsh, Westerly's own Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy (who starred in this play on Broadway; there was also a revival in New this spring with Julie Harris and Charles Durning). As you can tell by the competition, the play is largely about the skill and personalities of the two actors who have to carry the whole play. Walsh and Bruno do a decent job with balancing conflicting traits, making this geriatric odd couple dynamic enough to keep us interested.

Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey are strangers when they meet on the porch of an old age home, where each has arrived in recent weeks. At first he acts like a junior high school kid who blurts inappropriate things to girls ("Does the food around here give you diarrhea?"). But soon he redeems himself with charm and energetic opinions. Both traits came in handy in his prior life as partner in a marketing and research business, dispensing authority for pay. Fonsia is rather nondescript, more a foil for his sparkle and occasional flaring temper than much of a personality in her own right.

The gin game he suggests provides them a common ground. She's new to it but can't help winning. He's an old hand at it but can't help losing. That simple comic engine is what drives the play, and the contrivance works surprisingly well. They get to know each other through the ups and downs of their coping with him being a miserably bad loser. Four card games over three weeks test them much as some equally intense and brief amorous encounters might with a younger couple.

The rest home porch is as revealing a spot as a bed for intimacy: he blows up and upends the card table; at another point she strikes him in anger. Since their relationship doesn't distract us with sex, we come to understand their personalities pure and simple. As he probably demonstrated all his life, Weller is a bully who can't stand to not get his way, a guy who blames bad luck and others for his failures.

Walsh has the easier role as Weller. We can readily recognize a man who gets by on heartiness and blaming others, and Walsh gives him a scampish exuberance that lets us forgive him as easy as we would a kid. Bruno has a harder time with Fonsia, a woman who sent an unreliable husband packing early on and who has been estranged from her only son for years. The role requires a passive-aggressive wolverine in grandma's clothing. We need a Dr. Ruth with a mean streak and a smile that drops like a guillotine. Here we get plenty of sobs but not so much as a drop-dead glower.

The set design by Mary Meyers does more than a little to set the necessary mood. The porch screens are intact -- no hitting us over the head with squalor -- but we see that little care has been taken to provide a tidy and comfortable space for these old folks. A broken shutter here, a spare folding bed there remind us that Fonsia and Weller too are no longer needed, are in temporary storage themselves.

It must have been a slow year for Pulitzers, the 1978-'79 season, for The Gin Game to win the honor. It's basically a sitcom set-up and delivery that only develops the characters toward the conclusion, as though out of obligation to give ticket-purchasers a dollop of drama atop this ain't-they-cute-angry confection. Fortunately, Bucky Walsh keeps things as fascinating as watching a bully beat himself up on the schoolyard playground.