Good Deal

by David Anthony Fox

THEATER

There are great plays, and there are plays that actors and audiences love. Sometimes they are the same, of course. More often, Broadway hits that are big crowd pleasers — and provide performers with their juiciest roles — are not so much masterpieces as cleverly engineered tours de force.

Take The Gin Game. Though it won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for drama, I doubt even its author, D.L. Coburn, would claim it to be a "great" work. The stakes are too low for that, if you'll pardon the pun.

But it is a cunning and sometimes touching piece, this two-character tale of an elderly man (Weller) and woman (Fonsia) consigned to a dreary nursing home. They pass the time playing gin (14 hands in the course of the play), and discover surprising things about themselves and each other.

Others (Beckett, for one) have written more harrowingly about old age, but Coburn has his own gifts for tragicomedy, and in the hands of marvelous actors, The Gin Game can indeed seem great. So it did twice on Broadway: in the '70s with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and in the '90s with Charles Durning and Julie Harris.

Can Triangle pull off similar magic with William Spangler and Sheila Stewart? To judge from past success, it's likely. And director Jane Stojak, one of Philadelphia's most energetic theatrical entrepreneurs, scores again by sharing this production with a theater in Harrison, Maine. Stojak has become a veritable one-woman juggernaut, making Triangle — less than three years old — a theater to watch.

Why not start with The Gin Game?

The Gin Game, Thu.-Sat., Aug. 5-7, 8 p.m., Sun., Aug. 8, 3 p.m., $15-$20, Triangle Theater, 1220 N. Lawrence St., 215-763-0110.