The Gin Game
by D.L.Coburn

Name: The Gin Game
Brand: D.L.Coburn
SKU: 9780573609763
Rating: 3.56 (48 reviews)

Broadway West End

The Gin Game Book Cover — The Gin Game Cover

Highlights

Female

Male

90 mins Present Day Strong Role for Leading Man (Star Vehicle) Strong Role for Leading Woman (Star Vehicle) Role(s) for Senior Actor(s) Exterior Set Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes Comedy

Awards & Recognition

Pulitzer Prize Tony Award

Winner! 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Nominee: Four 1978 Tony Awards, including Best Play Nominee: Three 1997 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play

Synopsis

This winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which originally starred Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, and later starred Julie Harris and Charles Durning (1997) and Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones (2015), uses a card game as a metaphor for life.

Weller Martin is playing solitaire on the porch of a seedy nursing home.

Enter Fonsia Dorsey, a prim, self-righteous lady.

They discover they both dislike the home and enjoy gin rummy, so they begin to play and to reveal intimate details of their lives.

Fonsia wins every time, and their secrets become weapons used against one another.

Weller longs for a victory to counter a lifetime of defeats, but it doesn’t happen.

He leaves the stage a broken man, and Fonsia realizes her self-righteous rigidity has led to an embittered, lonely, old age.

Press Reviews

"A thoroughly entertaining lesson in the fine art of theatrical finesse. The closest thing the theatre offers to a duel at 10 paces."
— The New York Times

"Extremely intelligent... fine bittersweet comedy... Funny, sad, profane, eloquent, touching, beautiful."
— WABC-TV

Characters

Character	Gender	Age	Description
Weller Martin A man who sees life in terms of winning and losing. He is terribly competitive and deeply bitter.	male	—	A man who sees life in terms of winning and losing. He is terribly competitive and deeply bitter.
Fonsia Dorsey Prim and proper, Fonsia appears to be a fragile victim who has been abandoned to the run-down.	—	—	Prim and proper, Fonsia appears to be a fragile victim who has been abandoned to the run-down.