Last night, Sarah and I finally watched the production of The Gin Game that we'd taped off PBS a few weeks ago. Maybe I'm too dim or something to "get" it, but something about it was entirely unsatisfying.
Sarah had been more interested in it than I. But when Dick Van Dyke started cursing up a storm (on PBS, no less), I decided to keep watching. The characters seemed rather interesting and were getting more so as time went on. But then I started to wonder why the woman, played by Mary Tyler Moore, kept hanging around with the guy. And that question was never really satisfyingly answered for me. You get some hints and there's always the answer of just being lonely, but... something just seemed wrong about it. It almost made ME feel stressed just watching it.
But the thing that really made it not work for me was the ending. It didn't seem very conclusive to me. We hadn't learned enough. It felt like we left the story just as it was starting to get interesting, just as we were learning the important things about these characters and what drove them.
I didn't discover until today that this was originally a play. Maybe I'm too common to understand a play like this and its "deep meaning". Or maybe it's just not to my tastes.
It was a treat seeing Dick Van Dyke calling Mary Tyler Moore a bitch, though.