A hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, A Gambler’s Guide to Dying comes to Los Angeles with an American actor delivering the monologue, which was written (and first performed) by a Scot, Gary McNair. Maury Sterling (Max on Showtime’s “Homeland”) substitutes for McNair masterfully, not only commanding the stage in charismatic fashion but speaking with a believable Scottish accent. So many local references crop up in the play that the producers thought it wise to publish a glossary in the program. That’s not to say, though, that McNair’s text is so parochial as to be incomprehensible; on the contrary, it has universal qualities that anyone can understand and relate to. The tale the narrator tells in Gambler’s Guideis about his grandfather, a working-class guy who came to local fame when he won 2.5 million pounds betting on the 1966 World Cup. Instead of blowing it all on cars, booze or broads, gramps simply put the money in the bank and carried on with his usual life, working nine to five, gardening in his spare time. He also kept gambling, but not for the money (he bet only small amounts), just for the joy of it. Joy was what this simple but good man was all about: joy of life, love, family, story-telling, a beer at the pub. Gramps’s humanity, his joie de vivre, never wavered or deserted him, not even when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 and died a painful death soon afterward. He remained, to the end, a decent, honorable, good man, the salt of the earth really. Sterling brings him to life in flawless, spellbinding fashion, aided no doubt by his director, Paul Linke, who is no stranger himself to solo shows about life and death, having written and performed Time Flies When You’re Alive, an L.A. stage classic, thirty years ago at the Powerhouse Theater.
