Word: cronyn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pulitzer Prize last season, although no one is quite sure why. The play concerns two old people, confined to a nursing home, who get acquainted over the card game that fills the too-many empty spaces in their lives. A somber theme, but the performances of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy under Mike Nichols' direction are a joy. At the Wilbur...
...Game. In this first work by Playwright D.L. Coburn, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn feint and parry with a sparkling professional finesse polished through decade after decade after decade...
This drama is set in an old-age home, but one suspects that none of the pensioners are quite so feeble as the play. As dramatic carpentry, The Gin Game is made of balsa wood, while the performances of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy rival the sturdiest oaks. Their artistry is compelling, and they supply the play with, its only bracing vigor...
...that they seem remotely vigorous when the curtain rises. Weller (Cronyn) is in a rumpled bathrobe, and his cane is the only leg he can really count on. Fonsia (Tandy) is encased in a mummy sack of a housedress, and she seems too utterly drained of strength to lift her frowzy bedroom slippers from the floor when she walks. Their mutual terrain is a porch that is peeling in genteel decay. They know all about decay; they are waiting-desperate, lonely, trapped-to find out about death...
Playing two distinctly unattractive characters, Cronyn and Tandy keep an unfailing grip on the audience not by the characters that they portray but with how they interact in flawless craftsmanship. Their words, gestures, voices and facial expressions are like the serves, volleys, lobs and smashes of a championship tennis match. They score 6-love in a play that is stalemated at deuce...