Kerschen is a school district administrator and freelance writer. In this essay, she suggests that the card game is a metaphor for life and that the nursing home is a metaphor for hell.

Productions of Coburn's play The Gin Game have been staged in numerous countries and languages on a continuous basis since its debut on Broadway. While it may seem an oddity that a two-person play could have any depth to it, The Gin Game has proved that a play about a man and a woman can be as rich and complex as the relationships they portray.

Billed as a tragicomedy, The Gin Game focuses on an elderly man and woman living in a shabby nursing home. They chat as they play a seemingly innocuous card game, but as Polly Warfield notes in a review for Back Stage West, the deck of cards “is The Gin...