The Gin Game

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Harris and Durning are two spritely, tough senior citizens who meet over a game of gin rummy that's anything but just a game. Coburn's virtually plotless, Pulitzer Prize-winning play sets the card duel on the porch of a tumbledown nursing home. The poignant matches not only show the depths of the unlikely pair's emotional emptiness, but also their strangely combative attraction to each other. Harris masks an unexpected resolve of steel in her characterization of the adorable old lady next door; Durning is a grumpy old man who's as quick to judge as he is to shout out, “Gin!” Radiant, touching and satisfying, the play strips bare the human instinct to triumph — and sometimes humiliate — at all costs.