Rep's "Gin Game" shows a theater and a play in a hurry
By John Moore, Denver Post Theater Critic
February 4, 2005
David C. Riley is playing a game with stakes that are oh-so-much-higher than a friendly hand of gin.
He's betting the house - literally - on a gigantic and largely empty new home for his Denver Repertory Theatre Company. The doors open tonight with "The Gin Game" in a sprawling old, graffiti-pocked LoDo warehouse that once illegally housed Denver police horses at 2162 Market St.
Riley and his wife, Bonnie, have taken out a second mortgage on their home to lease the 18,000-square-foot, three-level space in the Megill Painting Complex a block east of Coors Field. One day, Riley envisions it will include a main floor with a coffee shop, theater bookstore, photo studio and art gallery. He sees a 120-seat mainstage and a 50-seat studio theater operating simultaneously on the second floor. And he imagines subsidizing the operation by converting the basement into rentable storage spaces.
One day, however, is not today. Unlike most businesses that build before welcoming the public, Riley is opening for business tonight in an atmosphere that might best be described as indoor street theater. Adventurous patrons will wander to the rear of the main floor and take a freight elevator or stairs to the second floor, where hanging plastic liners show where walls one day will stand. In the middle of this massive, empty space is the only sign of construction: risers that have been built to hold four rows of old seats donated by the John Hand Theatre.
It all feels funky, urban and slightly illegal, though Riley swears he has the blessings of the city and fire department. But why the rush? Well, when you have a rent of $3,500 a month, you don't have the luxury of time. Photographer Brett Humphrey will assume half the financial responsibility, but the Denver Rep in effect has just entered the fifth year of a five-year business plan. And it turns 1 later this month.
On March 4, Riley will debut "a season of originals" - up to eight new scripts - starting with "Albatross." By January, he hopes to be fully operational with theater, poetry slams, classes, late-night improv, live music and cooperative ventures with other companies. "We hope to create a place where people can feel comfortable all the time," he said.
But first up is D.L. Coburn's poignant nursing-home drama "The Gin Game," a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that in 1977 starred Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn on Broadway.
The Rep's long-range prognosis is anyone's guess, but its opener is already a proven winner. That's because the play, directed by Madge Montgomery, is being transferred downtown after an expert three-week run at the Mary Miller Theatre in Lafayette.
"The Gin Game" is the beautifully written story of two senior citizens who bond on the back porch of a rundown nursing home over hands of gin. Fonsia is charming and upbeat, a perfect foil for Weller's cynical curmudgeon. Their genial banter initially evokes the old-time repartee of Tracy and Hepburn, but this is far from a simple, sentimental story of finding love late in life. As the pair start to open up, their vulnerabilities, secrets, obsessions and delusions are achingly laid bare. Through sharp, believable dialogue, this startling character study becomes a somber treatise on aging. "Nursing homes," Weller says, "are warehouses for the emotionally and intellectually dead."
This play requires two veteran actors of uncommon nuance, and Montgomery has found them in Timothy
Englert and Ellen Ranson. These two are as comfortable onstage as an old married couple, which works mostly in their favor. The strangers seem a little too familiar and fond of one another at first, but the actors' long history performing together clearly has helped them to fully mine a deceptively complex script for every raised eyebrow, twirling ankle and tossed table. And the combustible climax requires an uncommon trust between actors.
As guileless Fonsia, Ranson somehow elicits the girlish spirit of a 71-year-old still capable of being awed by a magic trick. And as a temperamental, sarcastic senior whose only disease is "an advanced case of old age," Englert seems to have been plucked out of any basement in America.
When Weller patiently teaches his new friend how to play gin, she, of course, wins every hand. But what seems at first nothing more than a sweet bit of dramatic artifice soon devolves into a fiery outlet for lamenting lives not fully realized. As Weller's frustration grows, so too does his dark side, until it becomes difficult to look at Englert in the eye for fear he might be looking back.
The run undoubtedly will be a bit more haggard at the Rep. Only the props and furniture will travel with the actors to Denver, so Riley has built an exterior wall and some French doors. He also has strung a few lights to the ceiling and will run sound through an iPod. But as the play makes clear, life can be messy. And there is no time to waste.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or denverpost.com.