Loading summary
Transcript67 lines
- [00:02]
A
I'm gonna pull over and ask that man for directions.
- [00:05]
B
Hi there.
- [00:05]
A
We're looking to get to the campground.
- [00:07]
C
Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. No, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
- [00:13]
A
How are you getting a signal out here?
- [00:14]
C
T Mobile and US Cellular decided to merge, so the network out here is huge. We're getting the same great signal as the city and saving a boatload with all the benefits. Oh, and a five year price guarantee. Okay, here's those directions.
- [00:26]
A
Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?
- [00:29]
D
America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available in US Cellular stores. Best mobile network based on analysis by Ookle of Speedtest Intelligence data 2H2025 bigger network. The combination of T Mobile's and US cellular network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. CT visit t mobile.com for details.
- [01:05]
B
The year is 1978. Congress and the country are divided over whether to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama. New changes in Social Security go into effect, raising payroll taxes, reducing future benefits for high earners, and generally increasing anxiety about how easy it will or won't be to retire as the number of people 65 or older rises to one out of every nine Americans. Meanwhile, high inflation, rising unemployment, and sluggish economic growth continued to worry Americans of all ages. And in that year of 1978, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to D.L. coburn's The Gin Gang, a two hander about the last chance relationship between two lonely people and a retirement home. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for drama. I had just begun working on this episode when the news came that DL Coburn had died on December 3rd at the age of 87. I was sorry to hear that for many reasons. Coburn hadn't yet turned 40 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his very first play. And although he wrote at least seven other plays over the following decades, none were published and only one was staged. And yet Coburn remained proud of the Gin game, often going around the country to see productions of it and seemingly always willing to talk about it. His widow told the New York Times that he had been disappointed, but not Bitter about the way his career had worked out and that he had never stopped writing. I think he learned that kind of perseverance early in his life. Donald L. Coburn was born on August 4, 1938, in East Baltimore, Maryland. His parents divorced when he was 2. His salesman father pretty much disappeared from his life after that. And when he was six, young Don's mother became so disabled with tuberculosis that he had to spend the next seven years living in a group home for boys. He enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school and spent two years in the late 1950s serving aboard a destroyer in the Mediterranean. Although he didn't go to college, Cockburn had always found a refuge in words, reading them and writing them. And Coburn was also a go getter, someone who knew he had to make his own way in the world. And so when he was discharged from the Navy, he set up his own one person advertising agency in Baltimore. He did well enough with it that a few years later he got hired as a copywriter for a larger ad agency in Dallas, where he worked for the next decade or so. On the side, Coburn wrote short stories mainly to entertain himself, but maybe because he was a short story writer, he went one evening in 1971 to the Dallas Theater center to see a staged version of Diary of a Madman, Nikolai Gogol's classic short story about the mental disintegration of a low ranking civil servant with delusions of grandeur. Coburn was so moved by what he saw that he not only went back to see the production several times, but decided that he too would try his hand at writing a play. He began writing one about two elderly people playing a game of cards, but he couldn't figure out where to go with it, and so he put it away. Then a couple of years later, his young son asked him what had happened to the play. And so Coburn started working on it again, and this time he finished it. He also tracked down Kip Niven, who had directed the Go Go play he had seen a few years earlier, and persuaded Niven to read his. Niven liked it, and in 1976 he staged it at the American Theater arts, a tiny 49 seat theater in Los Angeles. The gin game unfolds in a series of scenes on the porch of a rundown retirement home where an elderly man named Weller and an elderly woman named Fonzia played gin rummy. At first, a friendship develops as they play, but although she's a newcomer to the game, Fonzia keeps winning to the growing irritation of weller eventually pushing both of them to a breaking point. It's a deceptively simple play that can be done as a comedy about two old folks bonding and bickering, but at its core, the Gin Game is actually a tragedy about the loneliness and fears of old age and about how people can get stuck in repeating the same mistakes over and over again throughout their lives. A critic for Variety gave that first LA production a positive review, and it caught the attention of John Jury, the artistic director of Actors Theater in Louisville. He thought the Gin Game would be a perfect piece for the festival of new plays that he was just starting up. He also mentioned the play to his friend, the actor Hume Cronin, and after reading the script and traveling to Louisville to see the production, Cronin decided that the Gin Game would be a perfect vehicle for him and his wife, Jessica Tandy. The Cronins asked their friend Mike Nichols to direct it, and on October 6, 1977, just a little over a year after its very first performance anywhere, the Gin Game opened at Broadway's John Golden Theatre, where it ran for 517 performances. It was nominated for four Tony Awards, play, director, actor, Actress. It lost best play to the Elephant man, but Tandy took home the award for best actress. The Elephant man was a British play, which disqualified it for the Pulitzer Prize and that year's Pulitzer jury, a particularly high powered group consisting of the New York Times, Walter Kerr, the Wall Street Journal's Edwin Wilson and the New Yorker magazine's Edith Oliver, chose the Gin Game as the best play of the year written by an American. They said it was the one new play that year of sufficient originality, invention and staying power. When Tandy and Cronin left the Broadway production to tour the play around the country, E. G Marshall and Maureen Stapleton took over the roles of Weller and Fonzia. But it was the Cronins who performed the play in London, and they did a version for television which can now be found on YouTube. In 1986, there was an attempt to adapt the Gin Game into a musical called Jokers. It had a tryout at Goodspeed, the incubator for musicals in Connecticut. Roddy Graham played Weller and Kim Hunter Fonzia. As its title suggests, the musical pumped up the humor. It made Weller, a former vaudevillian eager to relive his glory days. It created an eight member ensemble who played the characters on the playing cards, and it gave the show a happier ending than the original has. But Joker's never made it to Broadway or anywhere else. In 2003, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, who had starred as husband and wife on the beloved sitcom the Dick Van dyke show, reunited 37 years after that show's final episode to play Weller and Fancia for a PBS production that's also on YouTube. The Gin Gang was also revived on Broadway in 1997 with Charles Durning and Julie Harris, and then again in 2015 with James Earl Jones, who was 84 at the time, and Cicely Tyson, who was 90. It was the final stage performance for both those titans. Over the years, the play has been translated into Chinese, German, Polish, and Russian, among other languages. And there have been and continue to be scores of local productions here in this country put on by regional companies, community theater groups, colleges, and even high schools. Last year, the Society for Ethical Culture here in New York presented a staged reading of the play. The producer of that production, Patricia Bruder Dubrovnur, began her career on Broadway in the 1950s and then went on to become a mainstay on the long running soap opera as the World Turns. She also founded the Ethics and theater program at Ethical Culture. And she played Fancia in that recent reading of the Gin Game. And she was kind enough to spend some time talking to me about it.
- [12:42]
E
Hello, Patricia Britter Dubrovnur, welcome to all the drama. Very glad to have you here. I want to start off by asking you, before we even talk about the play, could you tell us a little bit about the Ethics and the theater program at the Ethical Culture Society?
- [13:06]
F
Sure. Actually, I started the program back in 2005, so we've been doing it for the past 20 years. Every month we do a reading of a different play. And I think the Gin Game was one of our earlier plays. Ethics and the Theatre gives our members and guests a chance to watch a play reading. We have the scripts on music stands and after the play reading we have a discussion. We have the audience discuss the ethical issues in the play.
- [14:00]
E
Do you remember when you first encountered the Gin Game the first time you saw it?
- [14:09]
F
Not really. You know, I have a feeling that after I read the play, I think that I might have gone to the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and watched a video of the play.
- [14:30]
E
What made you decide to read it? What intrigued you about it? Four year program?
- [14:40]
F
Well, I think one of the main types of ethical questions has to do with the relationship between the characters in the play. Were they acting toward the other character in such a way that would help to bring out the best in that character, or is it Instead bringing out just frustration, which happens a lot in the gin game.
- [15:16]
E
You did this, I think, last year in 2025. Do you remember what were some of the questions or some of the points that people in your audience raised, raised about the play?
- [15:32]
F
No, I don't think I do. You know, I'm at the age where my short term memory is one of the things that is not as strong as it used to be. So, no, I don't.
- [15:49]
E
But you thought that the play itself was a good fit for your program?
- [15:55]
F
Yes, absolutely. You know, in terms of the complicated issues in how the two characters treat each other, particularly Weller, I think that Fanzia treats him well most of the time. But he's a bad loser, isn't he?
- [16:23]
B
Yes, yes.
- [16:24]
F
Very bad loser.
- [16:25]
E
A very bad loser. Now, you read the part of Fonzia in the reading last year, and the play is a little tricky to get right, I think, because it could just be seen as a comedy. But I think it also gets at some deeper issues about being an older person.
- [16:54]
F
Right? Yes. Yes, you're right. And he is really constantly criticizing other people. It's very hard for him and for her to be as honest as they might be. They lie to each other quite a bit. I think that they're embarrassed about the fact that neither his son nor her son comes to visit. And I think at their age, they very much need to have some family support and encouragement. But they end up pretending that her son is out in Seattle and that neither of them are nearby to visit, where that isn't the case at all.
- [18:01]
E
Do you have any thoughts about why the Pulitzer jury awarded this play a prize? Now, I know you're an actress, and so you've performed and read many plays. Why do you think they wanted to celebrate this one?
- [18:25]
F
Well, I think that the whole issue of loneliness and feeling rejected, especially, you know, when they're old and need more than ever to have others appreciate them and want to spend time with them. You know, he feels so embarrassed by his lack of winning. I mean, that he just. Just ends up throwing the cars up in the air, turning the cable upside down, just calling her a witch.
- [19:20]
E
It's sort of indicating the frustration he's feeling about his whole life.
- [19:29]
F
In a way, yes. And she actually would like to be of help and really thought that if he was to see a psychiatrist, it might really help him. But of course, that's just another reason for him to feel that he's totally rejected.
- [19:55]
E
D.L. coburn, the playwright, wasn't yet 40 when he wrote this play.
- [20:03]
F
Really?
- [20:04]
E
Yes. And so I'm wondering, as you mentioned earlier, your age, and I'm wondering, as someone who is older, do you think that he captured some of the feelings of what it is to be an older person, even though he wasn't one himself?
- [20:28]
F
I think I'm a bad person to ask that of because I've been very fortunate. I mean, I am 88 years old and I, my whole life have had so many positive opportunities and haven't had to feel like I was a failure.
- [20:52]
E
Well, because you weren't. You've had a successful life.
- [20:57]
F
Yeah, yeah, right. And I haven't had relationships where people are working against me. I'm very fortunate to have had relationships where people have appreciated and supported me. Our two daughters live near us and are very loving. My husband and I have been married since 1959.
- [21:31]
B
Congratulations.
- [21:33]
F
We met and fell in love when I was 15 years old.
- [21:37]
B
Wow.
- [21:38]
F
So we have had this loving relationship from 1952, I think it was, until now. I've just been tremendously fortunate. And my sister is five years older than me, in perfect health and constantly calling me because she lives up in Connecticut. But our extended family has always been loving and supportive. So I guess. I guess the Pulitzer surprise people were concerned about how many older people are having a difficult time of it, and I'm really not one of them.
- [22:30]
B
Well, that's a wonderful thing.
- [22:32]
E
That's a wonderful thing. I wonder, though, if in just, you know, just the course of life, have you ever met people like Weller, Fonzia?
- [22:47]
F
I don't. I don't remember meeting anyone like Weller.
- [22:56]
E
Well, that's a good thing, too.
- [22:58]
C
Yes.
- [22:59]
F
I mean, my husband is just such a loving, supportive person, and he has been so appreciated by all the people who've known him professionally and personally.
- [23:19]
E
Your story sounds like a wonderful one and the kind that we would wish for most people. I think, though, that Coburn's play sort of deals with those who haven't been as fortunate.
- [23:37]
F
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [23:40]
E
And that it helps to remind those who have been more fortunate than Weller and Fonzia that there are people whose lives have not been as easy. And I think maybe that's what Coburn's play does, and maybe that's part of what your audience appreciated when you read it.
- [24:12]
F
And maybe one of the reasons that it was given award is that the people giving the award felt that it was important for people to try to help the elderly and to be supportive.
- [24:34]
E
Yeah, I think so. He never produced. Well, he wrote other plays, but none of them were ever produced in the way that the gin gang has been.
- [24:52]
F
I wonder if he, at the age of, you know, about 40, whether he had elderly aunts or uncles or what his parents were like. Fantia says she's 71, and his parents would have been about that age. Makes you wonder what his parents were like or what his aunts and uncles might have been like.
- [25:20]
E
Maybe he tapped into his broader family, his extended family. His father left when he was 2, so.
- [25:29]
F
Oh. Oh, how.
- [25:34]
E
Yeah. And his mother, I don't know when she died, but she was very sickly.
- [25:42]
F
During his childhood, so he had neither really parent that he needed. Oh, my.
- [25:49]
E
And it's interesting that he didn't imagine then perfect people as maybe the parents that he would have had, but these very complex people.
- [26:02]
F
Yes, right.
- [26:05]
E
But however he did it, he was able to write a play that not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but that continues to be done all over this country and in other parts of the world, too, because I think it speaks to an experience that unfortunately, many people have. Yes, but I'm very glad it is not your experience, and I'm very grateful that you would take the time to just talk with us a little about the gin game.
- [26:47]
F
Yes, well, it's my pleasure. And, you know, I am pretty sure that I did the gin game earlier on and then just wanted to do it again last year for those who hadn't had a chance to originally see.
- [27:10]
B
It, and I'm pretty sure they appreciated it as well.
- [27:15]
F
Oh, yes.
- [27:16]
E
Yeah.
- [27:18]
F
And I had an excellent actor playing Weller. It was a pleasure to work with him.
- [27:25]
E
Wonderful. Well, again, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us about this.
- [27:34]
F
My pleasure, Janice, and all the best to you and to your work.
- [27:41]
E
And.
- [27:42]
B
Thank you for listening.
- [27:44]
E
I hope you'll come back next time.
- [27:47]
B
And if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please send them to me@janbrudwayradio.com.