Winning Combination Robert And Joan Welch Perform Brilliantly In ‘The Gin Game’ 15 Years After Playing Same Roles

“The Gin Game” Friday, Jan. 30, Interplayers Ensemble

This production of “The Gin Game” is a riveting and wholly effective piece of theater, yet this is only the most obvious of its achievements.

It is also a stunning reminder, as if we needed one, that Robert and Joan Welch are two of Spokane’s premier cultural treasures.

The Welches, the founders and co-directors of the Interplayers Ensemble, are the only two actors in this Pulitzer-winning play. They prove, once again, that profoundly good theater requires nothing more than two chairs, a card table, a well-crafted story and two people acting from both mind and heart.

Here, in a reprise of the roles they performed 15 years ago on the same stage, they have pulled off a triumph.

I was not here to see that first performance, but I suspect that this performance had even more depth and bittersweet heartbreak than the first. The Welches are now 15 years closer to the ages of nursing home residents Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin, and their performances are infused with sympathy and understanding.

Sometimes sympathy isn’t easy to muster for these characters. Robert Welch plays Martin with a cantankerousness that quickly goes beyond “lovable old curmudgeon” triteness. With his profane language (Fonsia scolds him several times) and his singleminded determination to beat Fonsia in at least one game of gin rummy, he becomes a frightening, almost volcanic force.

First, he uses sarcasm: “Are you sure you’ve never played this game before?” That soon turns to irritability, to sour grapes and then to downright paranoia. He accuses her of being a witch and of receiving gin-rummy instructions directly from God.

And then he becomes physically threatening. How threatening can a 70-plus-year-old-man be? Extremely threatening, as he looms his tall, angular frame over Fonsia, blocks her way to the door, and finally, in one explosive scene, takes his cane and savagely hammers the card table like an unhinged timpani player.

Joan Welch, as Fonsia, begins as the perfect foil for Weller. Where he is cranky, she is lovable and almost even cute. Her voice is sometimes girlish, the 71-year-old Fonsia taking simple childish delight in winning at a game of cards. She gets laughs just from her expressions and body language when she realizes that she holds yet another winning gin hand.

Yet Welch soon infuses Fonsia with deeper emotions. On the surface, she soon begins to feel fear and concern for Weller and his outsized reaction to her winning. Under the surface, she begins to reveal what is behind her facade, and it is not anything remotely simple, girlish, or delightful. We learn about her loneliness, her cruel and unhappy marriage, and her vast capacity for denial. In Welch’s performance, Fonsia lives as a character with a past so real and so touching that it hurts.

D.L. Coburn’s script grows darker and darker as this play progresses. By the end, these characters are stripped bare, revealed as the lonely figures that they are. The ending might be called bittersweet, but that doesn’t even go far enough. Tragic or even hopeless might be more accurate words.

In the end, “The Gin Game” has the undeniable power of tragedy, even if it is not quite “Lear”-like in its complexity.

We in the audience, while saddened by Fonsia and Weller, go away feeling the most unalloyed satisfaction in seeing two actors at the absolute peak of their art.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: “The Gin Game” continues through Feb. 21 at the Interplayers Ensemble. Call 455-PLAY for reservations.