The Gin Game
Drury Lane Dinner Theatre
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Sadly, the same attitude toward the audience seems to prevail in plays concocted for actors of a certain age. Designed to capitalize on their stars’ crusty charm and nostalgic appeal, these vehicles claim to be as roadworthy as the vintage autos proverbially driven by little old ladies from Pasadena–and some are, such as Alfred Uhry’s sensitive, skillfully written Driving Miss Daisy. But too often these scripts are nothing more than theatrical lemons, cobbled together in the apparent belief that neither the performers who drive them nor the viewers who pay for the ride will notice. Unfortunately The Gin Game–a 20th-anniversary revival of the Broadway hit that starred Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, now featuring Julie Harris and Charles Durning–is such a work. So is Jerome Chodorov and Norman Panama’s A Talent for Murder, which starred Claudette Colbert in its 1981 Broadway premiere and is receiving a deservedly rare revival with local notable Sharon Carlson.
In the mostly comic first act, The Gin Game mines some effective shtick out of the way Weller wheedles Fonsia into game after game: she’s increasingly distressed at the bad manners elicited by her ingenuous victories. And with old pros Harris and Durning at their most ingratiating, the characters carry on a pleasantly rambling conversation that touches on their personal problems, suggesting more than it exposes about failed marriages and absent children, physical infirmities and nameless terrors, before it’s cut off by Fonsia’s abrupt, inevitable declarations of “Gin!”
Novelist Anne Royce McClain is an unabashed eccentric who smokes cigars, belts down brandy, and starts fires in her wastebasket as a result of the other two habits. Her hateful family is plotting to have her committed so her lavish, art-filled home doesn’t go up in flames; any concern about Anne’s personal safety is decidedly secondary. But Anne puts the schemers to shame–and one of them apparently to death–with the aid of a home-security system whose apparently endless capabilities left me more than a little confused (it includes a secret recording component that Nixon would have envied). The playwrights’ reliance on technical gimmickry rather than Anne’s deductive powers is especially clumsy in this in-the-round revival by the Drury Lane Dinner Theatre, which lacks the design resources to make the mechanics clear.
