Sunset Contest
GOODMAN, WALTER
On Stage SUNSET CONTEST BY WALTER GOODMAN Gin rummy is not an especially exacting pastime. It tests neither the concentration, like bridge, nor the nerve, like high-stakes poker. But it does...
...Nichols' touch is at times predictable, occasionally he has difficulty resisting a shtick, and he is not above playing to the duller part of the audience...
...He escapes to the leaky porch, where we meet him cheating at solitaire...
...I suspect that this time out Nichols inspired some of the lines as well...
...To direct his first play, Coburn is fortunate in having Mike Nichols, whose last contribution to Broadway was Annie, and who is properly celebrated for his gift of turning a scratch double into a home run...
...And The Gin Game is really only a skeleton...
...But dwelling on the "meaning" of The Gin Game can breed nothing except dissatisfaction...
...Gin is particularly popular among the elderly, not merely because it is a painless way of getting through the day, but because the game can grant an occasional taste of what existence was like before it was clouded over by the years...
...He will have nothing to do with the manufactured fun laid on by the home, the never-darkened television tube, the visiting physician, the social workers, the volunteers with their paste-pot and scraps of ribbon...
...Mates and children gone, no visitors on Sunday...
...He is the weak bully, crochety now, but trying nonetheless to bludgeon his way through to some shadow of a victory...
...Moreover, the vehicle of a card game is simply not up to rough terrain...
...This Gin Game makes for an engrossing couple of hours, but serious poker it's not...
...It announces early on that through the game, in which Fonsia demolishes Weller, we are meant to learn what went wrong with their lives...
...Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, as Weller and Fonsia, work together with the smoothness bred of long intimacy, professional and personal...
...But his sharp sense of timing and detail can do wonders for a modest talent...
...Coburn's The Gin Game, resides in an old-age home that he rejects as he rejects his own trapped condition...
...for him, the card game is a lifeline back from the desperate present-and from a future promising only the implications of a high mortality rate-to a time when he was still in control, or thought he was...
...She, in what is the more interesting role, is the charming, correct, principled player, who cannot help winning even when she is aware of the devastating impact defeat will have on her opponent...
...The pleasure is in watching the variations pros can wring out of a single joke-one that keeps wanting to be much more than a joke yet succeeds at best fitfully, and even then as showmanship rather than drama...
...Here, for example, he produces a thunderstorm for the express purpose of permitting the roof to spring a prodigious leak, and he has Fonsia lose a couple of cards that happen to be between her teeth...
...Although Cob-urn has lighted on an interesting idea, and although he has some telling observations to make on old age, in homes and out, he has not done his job, and is finally reduced to having his characters explain to the audience what the play has been about...
...The play moves swiftly from set-up to denouement, relying on the direction and the stars to carry us through the empty middle sections without letting us notice that so little is being developed...
...With the arrival of Fonsia Dorsey, another loner, a sunset contest begins...
...Weller Martin, one of the two characters in D.L...
...They seem at first to be good medicine for each other, but that's before we get the hang of their allergies...
...Both are in fact losers, and in a conclusion that manages to be effective despite (or because of) its preordained quality, they drive off each other in the same way they have driven off everyone else who ever came close to them...
...More, it permits the player to create a kind of gin personality, to try out at the table quirks that he probably finds little opportunity to express elsewhere...
...But it does offer the satisfactions of ritual, along with some small jolts of excitement at the turn of a card...
...We don't find out, however, until the final scene, when the author explicitly sets out all that the action has failed to tell us (a great deal...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22
