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Printer-Friendly ModeDennis, Mueller have winning hand in Gin
June 8, 2009 —
Simple things can sometimes facilitate thinking about deeper issues. With The Gin Game, a basic card game opens consideration about topics such as old age, isolation and finances.
Janet E. Rubin brought the D.L. Coburn two-person play to the similarly intimate Black Box Theatre as part of the University’s spring season.
The two-act play follows the tense association between Weller (Jerry Dennis) and Fonsia (Amanda Mueller) — residents of a shabby retirement home, where “the heat doesn’t work half the time, except in the summer.”
Weller and Fonsia’s friendship is built upon their mutually bleak circumstances.
Family members have discarded both of them. Both lack the financial means to spend their remaining years in a higher quality home.
We learn these facts as Weller and Fonsia engage in several hands of gin rummy.
Weller, a self-professed master of the game, breaks the ice with Fonsia by teaching her the game. Fonsia gives “beginner’s luck” an entirely new meaning, as Weller is seemingly incapable of winning a hand.
The initial humor of Weller’s futility is quickly replaced by growing tension, as more flaws of each character are revealed with each hand Weller loses.
Tragic comedies are dicey projects to approach. They require effective writing and, more importantly, actors capable of convincingly making the stretch between the emotional extremes.
Both Dennis and Mueller play winning hands with their performances.
Dennis is at once a charmer and a bully. Lines played for laughs are shortly followed by intense outbursts typically reserved for Thanksgiving dinner of dysfunctional families. Mueller, a University student, makes the transition to elderly woman seamlessly.
Everything from the inflections in her voice as she cheerily talks about her grandchildren to her stage movements says “senior citizen,” not “college student.”
The Gin Game uses cards as a means of addressing more serious topics. Weller and Fonsia are, in their own ways, delusional about their situation.
Both are unable to accept they’ve been stashed away in a shoddy retirement home and are forgotten by people they spent their lives trying to provide for.
For Weller, his ability to be successful at gin rummy is the only thing that hasn’t been taken away from him. With her run of luck at the game she can barely play when she meets Weller, Fonsia strips away what Weller sees as his last scrap of dignity.
In the hands of lesser actors, this scope of comedy and drama would fall flat. In the hands of Dennis and Mueller, The Gin Game remains a play that teeters between bubbly and tragic.