D.L. Coburn, whose play “The Gin Game,” about two prickly residents of a retirement home baring their souls over hands of cards, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for drama, ran for 517 performances on Broadway and has been performed around the world — but who struggled ever after to have new plays reach the stage — died on Dec. 3 in Dallas. He was 87.
Marsha Coburn, his wife, said his death, at a hospice center, was from colon cancer.
“The Gin Game” opened on Broadway in October 1977 starring Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn — a married couple in real life — in a production directed by Mike Nichols after a whirlwind incubation of just 13 months following its first staging in a 49-seat Los Angeles theater.
The New York Times critic Richard Eder called it an “extremely intelligent and immaculately performed play.” Ms. Tandy and Mr. Cronyn toured in it nationally. It was revived on Broadway in 1997, with Julie Harris and Charles Durning, and again in 2015, with James Earl Jones, who was 84 at the time, and Cicely Tyson, who was 90. Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore performed it in a 2003 PBS production.
“The Gin Game,” a comedy-drama for two characters, is set entirely on the porch of a seedy home for seniors, where a man and a woman, who know each other only as fellow residents, expose the frustrations and regrets of their stunted lives over hands of gin rummy.
Describing his play in an interview with The Times the month it opened, Mr. Coburn said: “It deals with people who at a very late age confront many areas of their lives which have remained unexamined. This coming to a greater knowledge of self is a painful experience, at any age. But, when nearing the end of life, to have revelations about your entire life and all the choices you’ve made, that’s a cataclysmic experience, I would imagine.”
Weller, the male character, has had a disappointing career and a failed marriage, and is initially aloof and ornery. His cards partner, Fonsia, also divorced and solitary, has wrapped herself in a protective cloak of propriety. The two bicker, but slowly their carapaces crack, and their vulnerabilities bring them together.
In addition to its three Broadway runs, “The Gin Game” was performed in London’s West End and, in various languages, in Russia, China, Holland, Germany, Israel, Poland and other countries, not to mention at regional theaters around the United States.
Mr. Coburn was 39 the year the play, his first ever produced, made it to Broadway. A high school graduate, he had grown up in hardship in East Baltimore. He wrote eight pages of “The Gin Game” while working as a self-employed marketing consultant in Dallas before stashing the manuscript in a drawer.
For two years, he said, his young son would ask, “How’s it going with ‘The Gin Game’?” Finally, over four months, he completed the play, writing in a small notebook.
American Theater Arts in Los Angeles staged it in September 1976. A favorable review in Variety led to a second staging at the Actors Theater of Louisville, in Kentucky. The artistic director there showed the script to Mr. Cronyn, who decided at once that he wanted to perform it on Broadway with his wife, Ms. Tandy. Mr. Nichols signed on to direct within 24 hours of receiving the script.
When Mr. Coburn walked into Sardi’s restaurant after the play’s opening, on Oct. 6, 1977, the room erupted in applause. In an interview with The Times soon after, he expressed confidence that he would not be a one-hit Broadway wonder.
“I have a lot of things I want to express, and I have the confidence to express them,” he said. “You have to have confidence to write a complete play around a gin game.”
Donald Lee Coburn was born in Baltimore on Aug. 4, 1938, the only child of Guy and Ruth (Somers) Coburn. His parents divorced when he was 2, and he had little contact with his father, a salesman. His mother had disabling tuberculosis, and Don, as he was known, lived from ages 6 to 13 in a group home for boys.
He graduated from high school in 1957 and served in the Navy from 1958 to 1960. Skipping college to help support his mother, he found work as an advertising copywriter in Baltimore, and was then hired by the Stanford Agency in Dallas. He eventually struck out on his own with a one-man marketing and consulting business.
Mr. Coburn’s first marriage, to Nazlee Joyce French, ended in divorce in 1971 after seven years. He married Marsha Maher in 1975, and they lived in Dallas. Besides his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Donn Coburn and Kimberly Coburn Utz, and three grandsons.
After “The Gin Game,” Mr. Coburn’s playwriting efforts fell short of the same success. A 1979 play, “Bluewater Cottage,” was staged at the same small theater in Los Angeles that had debuted his first work but was not performed elsewhere.
A one-act drama in 2009, “Return to Bluefin,” about fishermen on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, written in the watermen’s dialect, was performed Off Broadway at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater, Ms. Coburn recalled. But after Mr. Coburn expanded it into a multi-act play, he could not find a theater to stage it.
He later wrote “House of Clay,” a drama with a three-woman cast, which had a reading in Dallas but was not staged.
Ms. Coburn said her husband was never bitter about the failure of his later work.
“Of course he was frustrated,” she said in an interview. “But Don was not an angry man. He kept writing and writing. That’s who he was. He never lost his love of writing.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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