Do not, Dylan Thomas warned, go gently into that good night, and no one could accuse Fonsia and Weller of that.
For that matter, no one could accuse Julie Harris and Charles Durning, the venerable greats who play these two characters in D.L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game,” of going very quietly, either. They are a fearsome pair of theatrical lions — very different sorts of lions, to be sure — but proud, ferocious, dignified and imposing theatrical royalty.
Unlike the characters they portray, they are in person sweet-natured and approachable. In summing up the complex woman she plays, the 71-year-old Harris says, in her gentle but direct and matter-of-fact manner, “Fonsie is a flawed person, very flawed, in fact. But we have sympathy for both her and Weller because they’re at the end of their lives. As am I.”
Durning, meanwhile, loves the wry tale of one New York review, which proclaimed, “Charles Durning is too young and slick.” “I’m 74,” he says. “I wonder how old you’d have to be for that critic? I guess I should be walking around on my knees.”
Those unfamiliar with Coburn’s 20-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, which opens Sunday at the Royal George Theatre, might be surprised to learn it’s no bittersweet interlude on golden pond. “The Gin Game” is an unflinching, hard-hitting look at a pair of people at the end of their lives, confronting the ugly sides of their characters in one last compelling, combustive and doomed relationship.
They meet on the glassed-in porch of the rundown nursing home where they strike up a friendship through a series of games of gin. From the start, Fonsie wins, time and again, and that pattern forms a metaphor for their roles in life and a mechanism that brings out the worst in both their characters.
“The author calls it a tragicomedy, and it is very funny,” says Harris. “But it’s also tragic because they realize at the end what they’ve done to each other and they know they’ve destroyed yet another relationship, their last chance, as it were. I think she’s devastated by what happens.
“She reminds me of the title of a play now in New York called `I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,’ ” Harris continues. “That sums her up and all of us a little bit, too.”
Weller, meanwhile, Durning’s part, is a blowhard and a failure in denial, his lifetime of insecurity and inadequacy embodied in this constant loss of cards. “What I say about her and what she says about me are true,” he says. “She’s a rigid, self-righteous woman without a nice thing to say about any of the men in her life. He’s a failure who thinks he’s a wizard. Though written 20 years ago, the play holds up. It’s still a portrait of what’s going on in those homes.”
Extraordinary is about the only word, meanwhile, for these two accomplished performers. Harris began her professional career in 1945 and won acclaim in such stage successes as “Member of the Wedding” (1950) and “The Lark”(1955). She played memorably opposite James Dean in “East of Eden,” and her long career included not only “Knots Landing” on television but “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Lettice and Lovage” back on stage and on the road.
Durning is a bit more of a later bloomer, though an icon of sorts now, catching public attention first in “Dog Day Afternoon.” In addition to a long, distinguished stage career, in everything from contemporary works to Shakespeare (his favorite role is Feste in “Twelfth Night”), Durning is now one of Hollywood’s best loved and most reliable character greats, with recent credits including “Home for the Holidays,” “One Fine Day” and “Vanished.”
“I always saw myself as a character actor,” he says. “Even when I was 19 or 20, when other actors were watching Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn, I was studying Claude Rains and Thomas Mitchell. For a while, when I was doing a lot of character parts, I thought I had things locked up. But as all the leading men in my generation got older, they started doing character roles, too — look at Jack Lemmon. That’s one reason I return to the stage, though it’s also my passion.”
He co-starred with George C. Scott in “Inherit the Wind” for Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre a few seasons back, an acclaimed production cut short by Scott’s ill health. Randall asked him to come back and do “Gin Game.”
“I told him okay if they cast either Julie or Ruby Dee, and Julie said yes,” he says. They had played in “The Au Pair Man” together some years back.
“He’s a wonderful actor and a great friend,” she says of him. He says of her, “She is so much of the moment on stage. I’ve worked with three geniuses on stage, and she’s one of them. Colleen Dewhurst and Maureen Stapleton are the other two.”
In real life, Harris is a good gin player. “Some of my frustration on stage is real,” Durning quips. He is, by contrast, a poker buff and plays in Hollywood at a legendary Sunday game with the likes of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Rod Steiger.
“Jerry Vale is the best,” he says. “He once won 72 weeks in a row.”
