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-- Julie Chase
Gin 'n' Juice
The Gin Game. By D.L. Coburn. Directed by Maria Mazer. Starring John Robb and Lee Brady. At the Phoenix Theater, 301 Eighth St. (at Folsom), through May 18. Call 621-4423.
A show about two people playing cards in a nursing home might sound about as fun to the uninitiated as staying home with your parents; but D.L. Coburn's 1976 play The Gin Game is actually a terrifying glimpse of an innocent relationship sliding into violence and misery. Even if you can still get that at home, the Phoenix Theater at least offers it in a potent but limited dose. The play is about Weller Martin, a cranky ex-businessman who likes to play cards, and Fonsia Dorsey, who meets him on the back porch of their dilapidated, low-rent retirement home and agrees to a quiet game of gin. Fonsia says she's never played gin before, but she keeps winning. She's a sweet-tempered woman, wearing a housedress and a cardigan; after a few winning hands she points out primly to Weller that she isn't used to foul language. "My father never smoked or cursed or ran around," she says, but Weller chews on cigars and swears like a street kid. At first he comes off as gruff-yet-kind, but the more he loses to Fonsia, the higher his blood pressure creeps.
Their first day of cards is Visitors Day at the home, and they distract themselves with gin because no has come to visit. Weller has lost touch with his family; Fonsia says her son lives in another state. And they're both divorced: So the card game becomes a shadow play of their old relationships. When Fonsia won't stop winning, Weller growls, "What are you, some kind of witch?" and suggests that Fonsia has "divine intervention" on her side. She points out that what Weller has called "bad luck" for most of his life might just be an excuse for incompetence and ill temper. Weller starts to shout. "You know what the problem is with most people in the world today? They have a mother just like you!" And -- twisting the knife -- he wonders out loud why her son never comes to visit: "I'll bet you made him feel like the lowest piece of crap, didn't you?"
That's a brisk summary of a few of their card sessions, but the idea is that the gin game, like more than enough marriages, degrades into a grudge match of gender-resentment. When Fonsia tries to quit, Weller won't let her. When she tries to lose, he gets mad. Weller accuses her (bewilderingly) of "playing games." John Robb and Lee Brady are both excellent in their roles, stoking the anger until it surges into something almost cathartic; Coburn won a Pulitzer Prize for the script in spite of its truncated ending. Brady seems a little more settled and comfortable as Fonsia than Robb does as Weller -- all her gestures and inflections are honest -- but Weller himself is a more uncomfortable person. He's a windbag, and if Robb acts a little more self-consciously like a windbag than necessary, it doesn't keep the card game from being an involving, unsparing show.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Mr. Big Stuff
Making Porn. Written and directed by Ronnie Larsen. Starring Ryan Idol, Joanna Keylock, Paul Michael, Patrick O'Connor, Peter Macchia, and Mitch Ellis. At the Cable Car Theater, 430 Mason, through May 18. Call 956-8497.
Making Porn, by Ronnie Larsen, opens a peephole onto the seedy, grimly funny world of gay pornography in the early 1980s. Although the second act fails to live up to the seductions offered by the spicy first, and the physical direction at times feels limp, the play deftly chisels a tale of desire and power, and how love sometimes slips between the two.
With almost cinematic splicing, the story cuts through a series of short, mostly two-person scenes, framing the struggles within a small gay-porn production house. Two-bit porn impresario Arthur has alienated his longtime lover, Jamie, who thereupon falls in love with the bright-eyed, bushy-tooled Ricky. Their seduction scene is teased out in the tenderest of terms, given their world. Jamie: "You're adorable." Ricky: (bashfully) "Really?" Jamie: (in explanation) "Do you want to see my hard-on?" Enter Jack, an untalented actor with a fabulous physique, played by real-life gay porn legend Ryan Idol. Jack has concealed his career from his wife, Linda, telling her that he's in "education videos." When Linda discovers the truth, she insists on coming to the set to watch. Her initial disgust quickly turns to impatience at Jack's unwillingness to take financial advantage of his talents. "I wanted to be a ballerina," she remarks. "Do you know why I didn't? I can't dance. Think about it."
Making Porn avoids moral browbeating, yet it also fixes its gaze on the industry's ugliest edges. When the specter of AIDS appears in the second act, Larsen paints the prevailing attitudes of the time in dark, bitterly funny tones. Arthur complains about actors wanting to wear condoms, and then muses that a vaccine is just around the corner. "Even if the vaccine comes out in May, then it takes a few months for everyone to get it," Arthur whines. "I can't make another film until August."
Since there's been speculation whether Idol is himself gay or straight, his role as this ambiguous character does little to put the questions to rest. Though the star's well-hung notoriety may be essential to the play's successful marketing, Idol's wooden performance as the awkward, straight dude is one of the few false notes of the evening. While he is supposed to be uncomfortable with his status as porn hunk, he attacks the sex scenes with professional verve -- pumping and preening with self-conscious, statuesque poise. The real star is Joanna Keylock as Linda, who pulls off a rather unlikely transformation from married legal secretary to porn maven with impassioned aplomb. Along with Paul Michael as the tyrannical Arthur, Mitch Ellis as his disillusioned partner, Jamie, and Peter Macchia as the irrepressible boy wonder Ricky, Making Porn provides more than a fun-house tour into a sexual underworld; it draws us under the sheets with a group of characters whose complexity defies even our most prurient expectations.
