A contentious and emotional card game between two senior citizens kicks off Bristol Riverside Theatre’s 2024-25 mainstage season.
The Gin Game, a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramedy written by D.L. Coburn in 1976, is celebrating its opening night on Friday, Sept. 13, at 8 p.m. at The Regency Room, 190 Mifflin St., Bristol, which is being transformed from an event venue into a pop-up black box theater as BRT undergoes renovations.
Starring former BRT artistic director Keith Baker as Weller and Barrymore Award-winner Zuhairah McGill as Fonsia, The Gin Game follows two retirement home residents who discover each other and begin a card game of gin together. As the rules of cards and life play out across the table, with both players locked in a relentless battle of wills, the game advances into all-out war through endless humiliations and ideological conflict.
Ahead of opening night, The Times spoke with Baker about his return to BRT, his quest to add dimension to the character of Weller, the relatability of the play and more.
It’s been over a year since Baker was involved with a BRT production, his last project being in March 2023, when he directed the full run of Cabaret after it was cut short due to the pandemic. For Baker, when asked by producing director Amy Kaissar to star in the two-person season premiere, the answer was an immediate “yes.”
“It’s one of the few plays performed around these days that has a role like this for an actor in my age range,” he said. “It’s a major role, it’s a terrific role, very, very challenging indeed. And of course, I jumped at the chance to do it, especially since it was going to be done here, and this is my home.”
Baker was already a fan of The Gin Game, which had its most recent Broadway iteration in 2015 starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. One of his favorite aspects of the play is that, despite being written several decades ago, its themes remain relatable.
“It’s about people in old-age homes. It’s about neglect. It’s about being on welfare. It’s about loneliness. It’s about the treatment of these people. I know these are issues that will ring true to so many people who have either relatives or spouses or mothers or whomever that are experiencing this sort of relegation to an old-age home, and all the difficulties and issues that are involved in that,” he said. “We haven’t had to alter a thing in the play to reflect the fact that we are now playing it in 2024. The same problems persist, the same issues persist. We haven’t had to change the language. We haven’t had to do anything to it to make it seem as though it were written yesterday.”
In The Gin Game, Baker takes on the role of Weller, an 80-year-old man who has experienced great defeat in his life. He is lonely, angry and bitter, and spends his days playing solitaire, purposefully separating himself from the other residents, whom he thoroughly dislikes. That is, until he finds an unlikely card partner in Fonsia.
“The gin game that he begins playing with this woman becomes a metaphor for life,” explained Baker. “Because, without giving the story away, he never wins the game in the entire play. And that is very much his life.”
Throughout The Gin Game, audiences learn a lot about Weller, including how his temperament got him kicked out of several previous retirement homes. According to Baker, it’s also likely the reason he never found success in life. Simultaneously, audiences — and Fonsia — see that there is more to Weller than his cranky exterior, something he and director Jon Maran, who directed Baker in BRT’s Old Wicked Songs about a decade ago, wanted to lean into.
“He is facing a kind of dementia in which he goes on wild imaginings in his mind, and paranoia and mistrust and unexpected violence. But you just can’t play that all the time,” said Baker. “That just can’t be there all the time. You’ve got to find all the other dimensions of the character, all of the other possibilities so that when those elements arise, the violence, the anger, the temper and all of that, it’s explosive, it’s real. He’s not just a grumpy old man, which is very possible to play. This is a kind of grumpy old guy who just gets mad and hates everybody, and I’m not the least bit interested in that.”
In fact, during The Gin Game, Fonsia tells her new acquaintance that he is wonderful company with a great sense of humor … even if it’s usually sarcasm.
“So he’s not without charm. He’s not without some level of warmth,” said Baker.
Aside from the intermission, Baker is on stage throughout the entire duration of the 90-minute, two-act play, which involves a whopping 14 rounds of gin.
“It is treacherous territory keeping track of the scoring, the games themselves, conversations coming into the games, going out of the games, because they change subjects so quickly. They go onto different things,” he said. “It is just treacherous territory for an actor to memorize and to learn that. But we’re pinning all of that down this week so that it flows.”
Plus, it’s helpful that Baker and his co-star McGill quickly established a smooth working relationship. He praised McGill for taking a role that was originally written for a white actress and making it her own.
“This is one of the only productions that I know of in which the cast is interracial, which brings a kind of contemporary edge to things and changes the dynamic,” said Baker. “Zuhairah is playing it as a contemporary black woman. While the dialogue is succinctly white in nature, she’s been able to sort of enhance that and transfer it into a contemporary black woman that absolutely works well. It’s a joy to play with her.”
For those who attend The Gin Game, there is one main thing that Baker hopes they take away from it: “I’d like them to see the humanity of these characters and they can relate. It’s called a dramedy because it has real substance to it. These characters go through not the happiest of situations and, at the same time, the play is terribly funny many times. It has heart and humanity to it, which is why it won the Pulitzer. So I think it will be a thoroughly enjoyable experience for the audience and they will get it without any trouble.”
Visit brtstage.org/ or call the box office at 215-785-0100 for tickets and more information.
Samantha Bambino can be reached at sbambino@newspapermediagroup.com
