Date: Fri 08-Nov-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: SUEZ

Illustration: C

Location: A10

Quick Words:

theatre-Wharf-Marber-Dealer's

Full Text:

(rev "Dealer's Choice" @Long Wharf Theatre, 11/8/96)

Theatre Review-

Long Wharf Stacks The Deck With Newest Marber Comedy

(with photo)

BY JULIE STERN

NEW HAVEN - Remember what Kenny Rogers told us? "...You have to know when to

hold 'em/ Know when to fold 'em/ Know when to walk away..." etc.

The theme and central metaphor of Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice - at Long

Wharf until November 10 - is poker, with the emphasis on the ability to read

human nature to outwit and outbluff opponents, regardless of the strength of

one's hand. If you can do that you will end up a winner every time.

The plot revolves around a weekly poker game run by Stephen, a successful

London restaurateur. The game is attended by his ne'er-do-well son, Carl, and

the working class blokes who staff the restaurant. Although the men regularly

gamble away their earnings, with the exception of Carl they do not see

themselves as being enslaved to an addiction. Instead they harbor fantasies of

what they will do with future winnings.

The lugubrious Sweeney, a cook whose wife has left him, dreams of taking

better care of his five-year old daughter on their occasional visitation

outings, vowing that for once he will not show up red-eyed, broke and hung

over from an all-night marathon.

Sweeney's roommate is Frankie, a cocky fellow who is a good enough card player

to actually win because he knows enough to "play the man, not the hand."

Sweeney is saving for a one-way ticket to Las Vegas.

And Mugsy, a waiter whose irrepressible optimism is matched only by his

dim-wittedness, has visions of opening his own restaurant with Carl, with

backing by Stephen. Mugsy is undeterred by the fact the building he hopes to

buy is currently a public toilet, located between the hospital and the police

station in a very bad neighborhood. He is too much of an innocent to recognize

the proposition is a scam devised by Carl in an attempt to get money out of

his father.

Meanwhile, world-weary and self-mocking, Stephen alternates between teasing

and autocratic authority. His conceit is that his game is a school, a

controlled situation to teach the others to suppress rash impulses and acquire

discipline necessary for life.

With his inviolable house rules and computerized records of every hand played

over the last seven years, along with an understanding of each of the men's

personal weaknesses, Stephen fancies imparting a fatherly lesson to Carl.

The first act is a triumph of comic ensemble acting.

The drama turns serious with the arrival of Ash, a professional gambler come

to collect a œ4,000 debt from Carl. With no means of paying him, Carl invites

Ash to sit in on the game, promising that with his skills he will easily be

able to take the others, including Stephen, for everything.

Dealer's Choice 's discussion of generational conflicts and the struggle

between the desire to dominate and the need to let go extends beyond the realm

of real and surrogate fathers and sons (certainly Stephen is a surrogate

father to Mugsy, as Ash is to Carl), with reverberations that extend to every

sphere of life.

Most obvious are its ramifications for the eternal British problem of class.

The patronizing assumptions of the upper class that education and breeding

renders them better-equipped to assume positions of social and political

leadership, while the "little people" are happiest when they "know their

place" and stick to it have been articulated from Plato to Margaret Thatcher,

with contributions along the way from Marie Antoinette, Mussolini and Strom

Thurmond.

As Ash observes to Stephen in a climactic scene, "Kids are like Aces. We can't

help loving them, but sometimes you have to let them go."

Dealer's Choice may not be a great play, but it is greatly interesting and

very enjoyable.