Heart Burns

By T.E.Kalem

THE GIN GAME

by D.L. Coburn

This drama is set in an old-age home, but one suspects that none of the pensioners are quite so feeble as the play. As dramatic carpentry, The Gin Game is made of balsa wood, while the performances of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy rival the sturdiest oaks. Their artistry is compelling, and they supply the play with, its only bracing vigor.

Not that they seem remotely vigorous when the curtain rises. Weller (Cronyn) is in a rumpled bathrobe, and his cane is the only leg he can really count on. Fonsia (Tandy) is encased in a mummy sack of a housedress, and she seems too utterly drained of strength to lift her frowzy bedroom slippers from the floor when she walks. Their mutual terrain is a porch that is peeling in genteel decay. They know all about decay; they are waiting--desperate, lonely, trapped--to find out about death.

To kill time before it kills them, they play gin rummy. Weller entices Fonsia into what turns out to be almost a blood sport on the assumption that she is a neophyte. That proves to be a delusion. Over a period of weeks, she wins every game except one that she throws to calm his rising choler. Weller is a cantankerous old coot to begin with, and his blasphemies, obscenities and fit-to-be-tied rages deeply frighten and unnerve Fonsia.

However, the games must go on between them unless they want to go indoors and share the dispiriting company of the televegetables and endure endless chronicles of aches and pains. They enumerate their own heart burns between the games. Weller is divorced, alienated from his family, and went broke in business when he was fleeced by his partners. Fonsia threw her husband out (or perhaps devoured him) and so estranged her only son that he won't even come to see her on visitors' days. Unfortunately, information delivered as narration chloroforms an audience rather than charging it with strongly felt emotions.

Playing two distinctly unattractive characters, Cronyn and Tandy keep an unfailing grip on the audience not by the characters that they portray but with how they interact in flawless craftsmanship. Their words, gestures, voices and facial expressions are like the serves, volleys, lobs and smashes of a championship tennis match. They score 6-love in a play that is stalemated at deuce.

The ending is gaspingly melodramatic and violates the stream of plausible behavior. Maddened by Fonsia's gloating shout of "Gin!" Weller takes a murderous swipe at her with his cane. When she ducks, he tries to demolish the card table in his fury. Perhaps Mike Nichols, whose unobtrusive direction is a model of purity throughout, ought to have the cane shatter on the final blow to indicate the end of this pitiable pair's relationship and of their lives. -- T.E. Kalem

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