"The Gin Game," Novato Theater Company

Give them a hand

By Mark Langton
Article Launched: 02/13/2008 09:01:47 PM PST, Marin Independent Journal

Four minutes before anyone utters a line in "The Gin Game," now playing at the Novato Theater Company's Pacheco Playhouse in Ignacio, veteran North Bay actor Norman A. Hall steps onto the stage and does a full four minutes of shtick involving, among other things, the opening of a card table.

It is a setup of the highest order: Everything you'd want to know about his character, Weller Martin - his frustration, his need for (and lack of) control, his short fuses and slow burns - is there in those four minutes. It is a masterful exercise in comic understatement. As played by Hall, Martin is revealed to be a man with a system - and the system isn't working. The center does not hold.

And there the "shtick" ends. For this is not a comedy, but a serious piece of theater - a tragedy with laughs, if you will, that could hold itself up with any Equity house.

In its ongoing bid to shed its backwater image and be held to as high a standard as the other North Bay community theater companies, the Novato Theater Company has succeeded in pulling out another small triumph with this revival of D.L. Coburn's "The Gin Game," thanks primarily to the considerable talents of the husband-and-wife acting team of Norman A. Hall and Shirley Nilsen Hall of Novato.

"The Gin Game" earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 when first produced with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, another married couple. Revised in 1997 with Charles Durning and Julie Harris, it won a Tony that year. Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke took their turn as the two feisty elders in a PBS television special.

A poignant story of the developing relationship between two senior citizens, the play is set on the porch of a run-down "old folks home," and concerns the relationship between the curmudgeonly Martin, a longtime resident, and new arrival Fonsia Dorsey. Both have come to the last act of their lives without much in the way of money, friends or family, so they find in each other a comrade in a dark and hostile cave - and do so by playing gin rummy. The game is played throughout most of the play's action and neatly orchestrates the relationship between the two.

For his part, Norman A. Hall reins himself in, playing Martin with great generosity when his wife is onstage. Normally an inadvertent scene-stealer by sheer force of his talent for comedy (among his signature roles have been Alfred P. Doolittle in "My Fair Lady," Sir Joseph Porter in "H.M.S. Pinafore" and the ghost of John Barrymore in "I Hate Hamlet"), this is clearly serious business to actor Hall, resulting in a thoughtful, at times nearly terrifying, nuanced rendering of the role.

But it was Shirley Hall who was a revelation to this critic (no doubt, due to this critic's neglect), having only seen her in the past in light musicals. She is every bit the match for her husband, sinking her teeth into every meaty bit of this role. At times ferocious, at others demure, when called on to be funny, she expertly plays the situation for laughs, not the character. When called upon to be vulnerable, she startles us, suddenly, by revealing the Girl Who Was.

Both of these actors, in fact, have an ageless quality, a playfulness onstage in key scenes, that is, ironically, ideally suited to the elders in this story. For example, there is a moment in Act I where Fonsia can't find one of her cards, only to discover that she'd been holding it in her teeth. At the moment of her discovery, she catches Weller's eye, and they both smile. It is a lovely moment that crystallizes both the bond between these two characters as well as between this man and this woman.

Anyone who'd like to see how two truly fine actors can make your heart ache for two ordinary people whose lives have slid from dreary to discarded, run, don't walk, to the Pacheco Playhouse. I hear it's the best game in town.

REVIEW

What: "The Gin Game"

Who: Novato Theater Company

When: Through March 2. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays.

Where: Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd., Pacheco Plaza Shopping Center, Novato

Tickets: $10 to $20 Information: 883-4498, www.novatotheatercompany.org

Rating: Four stars out of five

Mark Langton can be reached at mark.langton@comcast.net.