Well here we are. Opening night for The Gin Game is tonight at Wayside Theatre. We had two previews yesterday that were a bit rougher than we would have preferred them to be but this old war horse of a play proved its merit as both audiences embraced it and the characters of Weller and Fonsia and took the ride for all it is worth.
What was fascinating about yesterday’s journey with two distinctly different preview audiences was how similar the reactions were. The demographics of the two audiences shifted as dramatically as day and night. The matinee was populated with Weller and Fonsia’s. Senior citizens (a large part of our audience base) were in the majority at the matinee and they loved every second of the play, howling with the laughter of recognition, holding their collective breath during the moments of powerful conflict, and gasping in unison when the big moments of character reveal through expletive came bursting out. The evening audience was decidedly younger (I think the average age dropped by 15 years or so) and if you had recorded the audience reactions to both performances they would have been identical.
About those expletives. I expect to get quite a few letters about the use of expletives in the play and to hear about it in the reviews. After the matinee one gentleman told me he was very upset at the language. The playwright D. L. Coburn’s use of expletives is delightfully and powerfully character driven. Weller not only swears quite a bit but he takes the Lord’s name in vain with a regularity that is as unsettling for quite a few in our conservative audience as it is for Fonsia. And that’s the point. Weller pours it on a bit thicker once he knows it gets under her skin, to the point that he pulls a few choice expletives out of Fonsia as their battle of the sexes reaches its final boiling points. Watching a couple in front of me last night, when Fonsia first came back with her first “God damn” the woman applauded and audibly said yes. Not because she was embracing Fonsia’s word choice, because she finally hit back with the weapon Weller had been slapping her with the entire play and proved she could do it more effectively. I’m sure other theatres have done this play and excised the expletives. I thought about it myself, but to do so, would completely disembowel the author’s intent.
Tonight we open. I think our legs are still a bit shaky heading into it. We’ve got a rehearsal to clean a few things up this afternoon and to try and clarify the ending a bit. But in the end, this play relies on its two senior citizen players to punch and counterpunch with the dexterity of performers of much younger years. Both Faith Potts and James Laster proved to themselves and the audiences yesterday that they can deliver this story with power and conviction and I expect them to hit the ball out of the park tonight.
We’ll see how it it goes tonight.
