December 23-29, 2004

theater

Gin and Chronic (Pain)

by Toby Zinman

The frequent productions of this D.L. Coburn play provide formidable precedents: most famously, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn; more recently, Julie Harris and Charles Durning. So director Joe Canuso and local actors Jane Moore and Harry Philibosian have their work cut out for them. And their difficulties are compounded by having to keep this repetitive, button-pushing play from becoming merely a series of illustrations for How Not to Grow Old. Lots o' luck -- both in the geriatric and the theatrical departments.

Set on the grungy porch of a dreary low-end old age home, the play revolves around two still-ambulatory and still-feisty residents. Fonsia enters weeping while Weller plays solitaire. (Get it? Solitaire.) Visiting days are difficult for them both since neither has any visitors. The other residents depress and bore them with endless talk of ailments and funeral arrangements. The entertainments are cheesy and the dancing lessons a joke since, as Weller points out, "half the people can’t get out of a chair."

Fonsia and Weller, sentenced as they are to stewed tomatoes, panic attacks and stolen watches, seem to hit on a solution to their loneliness: He teaches her to play gin. Her run of luck is phenomenal and she wins repeatedly, against all odds. At first he is amazed, then exasperated, and then, as days and weeks pass with her winning game after game, he becomes enraged. Is his losing streak caused by bad luck or by bad judgment? The question resonates as the central issue of his failed business. Fonsia starts out prissy, stopping only briefly at flirtatious, and moves quickly to what seems to be her normal manner -- self-righteous and judgmental, which may or may not explain her failed family. Bad luck or bad judgment?

Harry Philibosian and Jane Moore seem to be in two different plays: His delivery is all-natural, gruff and unadorned, while her acting is so mannered with such unnatural enunciation that the rhythm of their to-and-fro friendship is doomed to lopsided lurchings. The emotional burden of the play feels forced and shallow. I kept expecting to feel more upset and pained than I did. Both characters should be complex enough to seem pitiable and nasty, irritating and heartwrenching all at once, but the show never quite gets that far or that deep.

THE GIN GAME Through Jan. 2, Theatre Exile at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-922-4462