At Kansas City Actors Theatre, a powerful Gin Game

I’ve never had such a pleasant evening watching two people play cards.

As a tagline, that’s not likely to drive crowds to The Gin Game, the latest production by Kansas City Actors Theatre. But when the players at the table are actors Marilyn Lynch and Victor Raider-Wexler, we could all do with a few more hands.

The script, a brisk two-hander, won D.L. Coburn the 1977 Pulitzer Prize. KCAT — led by director Dennis D. Hennessy — shows us why. The production is a lean, nuanced study of aging firebrands after their dueling pistols have been retired in favor of playing cards.

Coburn deals us in on Visitors Day at the Bentley home for the aged — which, for residents Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey, might as well be any other day. Both Weller and Fonsia have adult children who never visit, for reasons neither seems eager to explain. And both have few friends at the retirement home. “Half of them are catatonic, for Christ’s sake,” Weller rages. “And sometimes the ones who do talk make you appreciate the ones who don’t.”

Their mutual hatred of whiners (and nurses cooing about “our medication”) make them fast friends. But when Weller, a serious gin player, convinces Fonsia to join him for a hand, the game becomes anything but friendly.

Fonsia swears that she doesn’t remember the rules or even how to shuffle the cards. Yet she wins hand after hand, aggravating Weller past the point of decency. While Fonsia chatters innocently about her working years or a visiting church choir, Weller shushes her to deal another hand. To Weller, victory triumphs over company and social graces.

Victor Raider-Wexler is bullheaded and brilliant as Weller, making the sore loser more than a grumpy old man. His commitment to the game is unswerving, his failures felt more bitterly for it. Raider-Wexler’s turns from coquettish coaxing to blind rage are masterful, and the tactics he chooses to keep Fonsia playing grow more desperate and transparent as their relationship deepens.

Marilyn Lynch holds her own as the shrewd Fonsia, disarming Weller with a naïveté that starts to ring hollow. Fonsia is, in her own right, as stubborn as Weller, and Lynch’s performance is tinged with the right note of self-delusion. These aren’t likable characters, but in Lynch’s and Raider-Wexler’s hands, we like them anyway.

The Bentley sun porch, designed by Jim Misenheimer, is shabby but dignified, its French doors and delicate spindles coated in an appropriately dated green. Shane Rowse’s lights add to the atmosphere, and Roger Stoddard and Daniel Warneke deliver a serviceable, if unassertive, sound design.

The Gin Game is an odd little play, one that cheerfully flouts some dramatic conventions while indulging others to its detriment. At its best, it’s an engaging character study, giving talented actors fertile ground for exploration.

But Coburn seems to change the house rules in Act 2, escalating conflicts with a speed as surprising (and unbelievable) as Fonsia’s gin luck. A violent crescendo obscures something arguably more tragic — the failure of two bright, critical minds to look hard at their own choices. And while Coburn signals strongly (and vaguely) that something’s wrong with Weller, it’s the character’s self-imposed isolation — not his illness — that disturbs us most.

The play’s sharpest sleight of hand is swapping cards for its characters’ emotional battles. Only as the losses add up and the game becomes more heated do we fully understand what they’re playing for.

With The Gin Game, Hennessy and KCAT have given us a handsome, haunting look at what it means to find the right opponent at the wrong time.