‘Choice’ Deals a Strong Hand

At the poker table: six men, several gambling addictions, a sinister, tight-lipped stranger. You don’t know exactly where or when, but you know you’ve been here before.

If shades of David Mamet, Harold Pinter and even Joe Orton run through “Dealer’s Choice,” the first play from British playwright Patrick Marber, the territory is not as familiar as it threatens to be. Set in a London restaurant late on a Sunday night, where five men regularly gather for a ritual game, the play laces its Pinteresque toughness with quips and a millennial tenderness. This is a room where every player eventually has a “tell”--a giveaway trait. In the pressure of an ostensibly friendly high-stakes poker game, each man reveals himself more than he means to, with results both funny and painful.

Marber, currently the darling of the West End, came out of nowhere, or out of the gambling den, to direct his own play at the Royal National Theatre in 1995. He has since written another hit play, “Closer,” expected to open on Broadway in the fall. In “Dealer’s Choice” Marber emerges full blown as a writer who acknowledges his debts and then deals out his own hand. The play is having its West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, where it opened Thursday night. Impeccably cast by Stanley Soble and directed with steely confidence by Robert Egan, the production never forces the play’s alternately sinister and comic undertows. The cast has fun with the familiar, and then sits back and lets the cliches find their own new grooves.

Take Ash, for instance. Ash is the stranger at the table, a professional gambler there to collect a debt in a roundabout way. As played by the commanding Daniel Davis, Ash looks like Frank Sinatra at his scariest, and he has the sense of humor of a dead fish. In a poker game, he can stare at a man as if boring a hole in his head, and then know with absolute certainty whether his victim is bluffing or not. And though Ash constantly threatens to erupt into a B-movie villain, he never really does. He is revealed instead to possess an unexpectedly poignant side.

Similarly, everything about the waiter Mugsy (Patrick Kerr) says he is one of those characters created for a humiliating fall. An antic clown with a dream of starting his own restaurant, he flashes an idiotic “love me” grin that also strongly says “kick me.” And though he takes a kick or two, he is spared the harrowing comeuppance we keep expecting. Meanwhile, another player gets exactly what we know is coming to him from the first scene. That’s how Marber keeps things percolating. As in life, some of the obvious happens, some of it doesn’t.

Also at the table are two restaurant workers, Sweeney (Daragh O’Malley), who’s trying to be a father to a daughter he rarely is allowed to see, and Frankie (Dan Hildebrand), a ladies’ man with a shaved head and cocky way. The restaurant is run by Stephen (Denis Arndt), the father figure of the bunch. Stephen is a benevolent dictator, taking lip from his men, covering their debts for them, but always making them pay, too--he never gives money without teaching someone a stinging lesson first.

In Arndt’s elegant performance, Stephen is the most polished and controlled of the men, but his despair runs deeper. According to the rules of the genre, he is the most manly--the smartest at cards. But all of his savvy cannot help him help his wayward son Carl (Adam Scott). Schooled in gambling by his dad, Carl is not any good at it, and he’s developed an addiction. It’s Stephen’s heartbreaking lot that he’s taught his son what he considers a necessary skill of manhood, and Carl is utterly lost because of it. Marber chooses not to tie up the mystery of what will happen to Carl, but he gives us a sobering sense of thewounds of both father and son.

Some dialogue borders on Joe Orton-Oscar Wilde pithiness. When told a co-worker’s father has died of a heart attack, Mugsy says: “Was there much history of death in the family?” “Yes,” answers Stephen, “it’s been a recurrent problem.” But where Orton would have ended this epigrammatic exchange on its wittiest note, Marber weaves the exchange naturalistically back into the narrative, stepping somewhat on his punch line. Marber does this because he’s invested heavily in these characters, and he has affection for them, and he refuses to subject them all at once to the expected fates that wait so harshly, out of frame.

The set, by David Jenkins, has a pleasing authenticity, both in the first-act restaurant and the second-act basement. The actors create a believably tenuous family, marked by constant quipping, the familial kind that combines hostility with affection. Their all-important second-act poker game unfolds credibly, down to the way the men absently fondle their chips in between hands. In “Dealer’s Choice,” the familiar is comforting and surprising too, rather like the endless variety of just how the cards will fall.

* “Dealer’s Choice,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends May 31. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Patrick Kerr: Mugsy

Daragh O’Malley: Sweeney

Denis Arndt: Stephen

Dan Hildebrand: Frankie

Adam Scott: Carl

Daniel Davis: Ash

A Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum production. By Patrick Marber. Directed by Robert Egan. Sets David Jenkins. Costumes Candice Cain. Lights Michael Gilliam. Music Nathan Birnbaum. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner. Stage manager Susie Walsh.