Old Enough to Play ‘The Gin Game’

Way back last month, before the actors Debra Winger and Arliss Howard leaped into a fast-track project that would consume much of their summer, they were skeptical.

They’d been approached to star in a downtown Manhattan production of “The Gin Game,” the D.L. Coburn play that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. It has nestled in the theatrical canon ever since, an old-people classic about a pair of card-playing nursing home residents whose budding acquaintance holds the potential to assuage their loneliness.

Winger and Howard, who are both 71 and have been married for nearly 30 years, had never seen or read the play, yet the title had carried certain associations. She thought of it as a big Broadway hit but also as “something maybe you wouldn’t go see, I wouldn’t go see, for whatever reason — just not our cup of tea.”

And he raised an obvious objection to a show whose most recent Broadway headliners, in the 2015 revival, were an 84-year-old (James Earl Jones) and a 91-year-old (Cicely Tyson). “I said, ‘I’m not old enough for that play.’”

“But, you know,” Winger recalled one afternoon last week, “for due diligence we thought we’d read it.” So they did, at their New York City home, aloud together.

The first surprise: The characters, Fonsia and Weller, are not too old for them. “She’s 71,” Winger said.

The second surprise: The play, in which Fonsia wins game after game of gin rummy against Weller, and he responds with growing ire, isn’t some cozy little comedy. Both characters are sound of mind and reasonably sound of body — a rare combination in the facility where they have landed, more dignified retirement options being out of reach. But Weller’s emotional volatility threatens their bond.

“I had no idea,” Howard said, “that it’s, for me anyway, about anger and the stories you tell about why you’re justified in not only feeling it, but living out of it, and isolation that comes as a result of doing that.”

He and Winger said yes, of course, to performing the play, which runs through Aug. 14 at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo. A significant draw for them was the producer-director David Blum’s notion of staging it in an intimate, unconventional space where the tickets would cost just $20.

When Winger and Howard spoke with me a few days before the first performance, their seeming calm belied their nervousness about the challenge they had set for themselves.

“Like, I don’t know if we can even do this,” Howard said, leaning back in his chair.

I asked if he always felt that way at that point in the rehearsal process, and he shook his head wordlessly.

Winger, who is more of a lean-forward conversationalist, said, “You’re looking at people with their hair on fire for sure.”

Hanging on a chain around her neck was one tiny clue to their frazzled state: a gold cross that was Fonsia’s, not hers. Until I asked about it, she didn’t know she was still wearing it.

Blum, their producer-director, is probably best known for having coined the label Brat Pack in 1985, during his journalism days, to describe a group of young Hollywood stars. More recently, in 2024, he was among the producers of Marin Ireland’s “Pre-Existing Condition,” another downtown show that put a boldface-name cast in a small space.

Last December, Blum, 70, was paging through a Saturday print edition of The New York Times when he came across Coburn’s obituary, which prompted him to read “The Gin Game” for the first time.

“I was really struck by how dark it was,” Blum said by phone.

Mike Nichols’s original 1977 Broadway production leaned into comedy, an impulse that Blum didn’t share. But Nichols’s stars were Jessica Tandy, 68 at the time, and Hume Cronyn, 66 — a married couple. Blum wanted to echo that element of the show’s heritage.

Winger and Howard met in 1991, working on the movie “Wilder Napalm,” in which they co-starred with Dennis Quaid. She had been famous ever since “Urban Cowboy” in 1980, her profile rising into the stratosphere with “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 and “Terms of Endearment” in 1983.

A few years into their coupledom, she walked away from Hollywood — a prolonged, self-imposed exile that inspired Rosanna Arquette’s 2003 documentary, “Searching for Debra Winger.” In the interim, she and Howard had a baby and acted in some plays together at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.: Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” in 1998 (Winger played Li’l Bit, Howard played Peck) and Chekhov’s “Ivanov” in 1999 (he played the title character, she played his wife).

Winger also had a teaching fellowship at Harvard in 1999. You can practically see the golden glow suffusing their reminiscences about that chapter of their past: living in a rented house near the divinity school; biking to the theater across Cambridge Common as leaves swirled in the wind; taking their toddler trick-or-treating for the first time.

“And I wasn’t overwhelmed,” she said. “It was like, I’m living my life.”

“The Gin Game” is not Winger’s first two-hander, though the Broadway production of David Mamet’s “The Anarchist” that she and Patti LuPone starred in, in 2012, opened and closed in a blink.

“Yeah,” she said sardonically, “not a big strong believer in the playwright directing the play anymore.”

Among Howard’s many theater credits are Ivo van Hove’s production of “Scenes From a Marriage” and Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” in which he took over for Sam Shepard when Shepard left the show.

Howard remembers Shepard telling him once that, since World War II, most men had effectively married nurses — women who scrambled around trying to take care of their damaged men.

“I had no idea that I was an angry person, really, until it was pointed out to me in our relationship,” Howard said, meaning his and Winger’s. “What I thought of as anger is when you are in a fistfight, or you’re breaking [expletive].”

“Women have a little bit of a lower bar, I think,” Winger interjected wryly.

“I didn’t know that you could vibrate with it, and that somebody would pick that up,” he continued. “I started seeing that what I thought was just a kind of a base-line energy of living was actually anger, and I tried to name it other things. You know, ‘I’m just agitated’ or ‘I’m irritated.’ So when I read this, I saw what happens, what the end game of that is, if you don’t look at it.”

He remembers how that emotion simmered among the men of his own small-town childhood in midcentury Missouri, and in the wider American culture. “You were learning anger, which is fear, just up on its hind legs looking for something to strike,” he said.

As for the American era we inhabit, he said, “I have never lived in an angrier time in my life.”

When I broached the subject of women’s successes provoking men’s rage, as Fonsia’s do in Weller, Winger deflected, saying she was interested in the formative effect of men’s anger on girls. That suggested something of a back story for Fonsia, who Winger imagines playing cards “as a kid, like under the covers because she was brought up so strictly Methodist” by parents who believed it was a sinful pastime.

“How does it shut us down early in life if we’re a child around male anger?” Winger asked. “How does it twist a young female?”

In any production of “The Gin Game,” though, aging is the primary frontier that the characters navigate. It’s also a fact of life that Winger, whose gray hair has made headlines, tries to address pragmatically.

“I keep asking my friends who are a little bit older, ‘OK, what’s the next change I’m to look for?’” she said. “For a woman, it’s shocking. It’s something to lose your estrogen or to have to replace it. It’s something to think, ‘Do you keep putting this poisonous dye on your hair?’ It’s something to think, ‘How much makeup looks right, now that it’s sitting in the wrinkles?’ You know? And can I dress like that anymore or is it disgusting? Men don’t quite have as many issues.”

Still, Winger sees no sense in clinging to youth.

“You are wasting your time,” she said. “But vitality? That’s something I’m interested in, and when I lose my vitality, I’ve really got to look at what’s sucking it, where am I leaking energy. We’ve all seen people in their 80s, 90s, very vital. I mean, Peter Brook ’til the end.”

That end, Howard believes, is the part that people don’t want to be reminded of.

“The play, really,” he said, “what it’s about ultimately is what old age represents in the culture: You’re going to die.”