Fonsia Dorsey
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The Gin Game is a two-person, two-act play by Donald L. Coburn that premiered at American Theater Arts in Hollywood in September 1976, directed by Kip Niven. It was Coburn's first play, and the theater's first production. The play won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Jul 22, 2023 · A moving story of the developing relationship between two elderly people in a rest home, the play unfolds during various hands of gin rummy... After its successful Broadway run, the play enjoyed an eight month cross country tour, then traveled abroad to London and Russia.
- 84 min
The Gin Game plot summary, character breakdowns, context and analysis, and performance video clips.
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.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
The Gin Gameis a two-person tragicomedy in two acts that uses a card game as a metaphor for life. D. L. Coburn conceived of the play first as a conflict between a man and a woman and strictly as a tragedy. He felt that the simplicity of two people and a card game could have more impact because of its concentrated format. The setting of the old age ...
D. L. (Donald Lee) Coburn was born on August 4, 1938, in East Baltimore, Maryland, to Guy Dabney and Ruth Margaret Somers Coburn. East Baltimore is an impoverished neighborhood, and Coburn's childhood was made the more difficult by his parents' divorce when he was only two. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1958 to 1960, right after graduating from h...
Act 1, Scene 1
Seated on an unused, enclosed porch of the Bentley Home for Seniors, a seedy nursing home, Weller Martin is occupying himself with a game of solitaire. A new resident, Fonsia Dorsey, wanders out onto the porch, and the two become acquainted as they talk about what brought them to the home. Weller offers to teach Fonsia how to play gin rummy. It is visitor's day, and, as they sort their cards, they share the reasons that neither of them has visitors. Fonsia wins the game, claiming beginner's l...
Act 1, Scene 2
The next week, Fonsia seeks out Weller on the porch as they both try to escape another visitor's day. Weller asks for a rematch at cards, and Fonsia eagerly agrees. However, before they start to play, they talk about the peculiarities and problems of other residents in the home as well as their own loneliness and frustration with their situation. During the card playing, Fonsia denies that she is on welfare, but Weller admits to panic attacks. Weller excuses his belligerent attitude as frustr...
Act 2, Scene 1
The next evening, Weller seeks out Fonsia in the garden. He asks her to join him on the porch so that he can apologize for upsetting her. She tries to get him to understand how frightening his temper can be. She advises him against playing gin, since he cannot control his temper when he plays. Unfortunately, Weller interprets the comment to mean that he is not a good gin player and once again gets the cards so that he can show her his skill at the game. She refuses to play, and they pick at e...
The Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn version of The Gin Gamewas made available on video in 1984 by RKO Home Video.The version of the play made for PBS and starring Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moorewas released by Image Entertainment in both VHS and DVD formats in 2003.Fonsia Dorsey
Fonsia Dorsey is a prim and proper elderly woman who has just moved into a rundown nursing home. She appears to be a fragile victim, a diabetic woman who has been abandoned by everyone she knows. No one comes to visit her. She says that her son lives too far away, in Denver, but eventually the audience learns that her friends, if she really has any, live in an upscale nursing home that Fonsia cannot afford because she is on welfare and that her son actually lives in the same town but hates hi...
Weller Martin
A resident of the Bentley Home for Seniors, Weller Martin is a man who sees life in terms of winning and losing, and he is deeply enraged because life has apparently defeated him. However, he gets a chance to win at something when he meets Fonsia Dorsey, a new resident at the nursing home who, like him, still has her wits about her. Here, at last, is someone with whom he can have an intelligent conversation. Furthermore, Fonsia can play cards with him, and he will have a chance to compete and...
Religion
"Yes, Weller, God gave me the card." This line from The Gin Gameis at the heart of Weller's dilemma. He is engaged in a struggle with God about his life. Weller exhibits a universal defiance among humans: we want to live by our own will, not God's. So far, Weller thinks that God has dealt him a rotten hand in life, and he wants to try to make it right, at least symbolically, by winning hands of gin rummy. He tries to will himself to win a game, but only a magician can bend a spoon with his mi...
The Gin Game is not set in any particular geographical location or any specific time period. Conduct a small group discussion about the other plays that you know that also have no specific location...The setting of The Gin Gameis a nursing home for the elderly. Visit a few nursing homes and record your impressions. Among those you visit, choose one that will likely have residents on welfare, li...There are seventeen hands of gin played in the course of The Gin Game. Do a mathematical study to figure the odds of Fonsia's winning every hand.The Gin Gameis a rare two-person play. Hunt for one- and two-character plays and make a list of those that you find, noting any commercial success these plays have had. Explain in an essay why you...Two-Person Play
A two-person play demands special treatment to be successful. Obviously, it is difficult for only two people to hold an audience's attention for ninety minutes. To do so, the actors have to captivate the audience with rich dialogue and the sheer strength of the characters' personalities. The audience has to care about what is happening between the two people onstage. Physical actions, such as Weller's overturning of the table, and sight gags, such as Fonsia's forgetting the card stuck between...
A Card Game as a Structural Device
The gin game is the engine of the play. In the course of seventeen hands of gin, the layers of protection that the two characters have built around their memories and emotions are slowly peeled away to reveal their true personalities, complexities, vulnerabilities, and circumstances. Playing a game against each other causes Weller and Fonsia to drop their charming facades and expose their controlling and competitive natures. Their revealed secrets become weapons used against each other. Each...
Tragedy Mixed with Comedy
One reason for the success of The Gin Game is its skillful blend of light and dark. Even though Coburn's intent was to write a tragedy, he gave his characters a sharp wit that actors have been able to turn into comic moments, which every good script needs, to ease the tension. The jokes about aging are universal. (There is "no hotter topic of conversation" than funerals around the home.) However, the comedy is achieved as much visually as verbally, through facial expressions and other body la...
The 1970s
The Gin Game was written mostly in 1976, the heart of the decade. In the 1970s, the various social movements of the turbulent 1960s, such as the Civil Rights movement and the sexual revolution, reached fruition. For example, women were admitted to the various military academies for the first time. Despite the myth that nothing much happened in the 1970s, it was a historically important time in which a vice president and a president of the United States resigned and this country found itself w...
Mid-1970s: In the mid-1970s, nursing home scandals break out across the country, demonstrating provider fraud and poor care, even though legislation was enacted several times to protect nursing hom...Mid-1970s: Approximately twenty-five million people are sixty-five years of age or older, and life expectancy is about sixty-seven years for men and nearly seventy-five years for women. Today:Appro...Mid-1970s: People are retiring between the ages of sixty-two and sixty-five, with the expectation of living, on average, only another five to ten years after retirement. Today:The retirement age is...Mid-1970s: Few people have heard of the age-related disease called Alzheimer's, even though it was identified in 1906, because it is difficult to diagnose and sometimes is confused with dementia an...On October 6, 1977, less than 13 months after the first performance before perhaps 50 people, The Gin Game opened on Broadway to rave reviews. It continued for 516 performances before going on triumphant tours of the United States, England and the Soviet Union.
The Gin Game, two-act play by American dramatist D.L. Coburn, produced in 1976. It was Coburn’s first play, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1978, the year it was published. The Gin Game centres on the lives of two lonely residents of a retirement home.
