Mah-Jongg, For Men Only

The tiles that bind: A scene from “The Men of Mah-Jongg.”

The tiles that bind: A scene from “The Men of Mah-Jongg.”

by Ted Merwin

If anything epitomized postwar suburban Jewish life, it was mah-jongg. With their manicured ruby nails clicking on the little plastic tiles, middle-class Jewish housewives made mah-jongg into their primary occasion for drinking, gambling, and gossiping with other women.
While mah-jongg lost popularity as Jewish women moved into the workforce, the game — following the retro trend of all-things-old-are-new-again — has exploded in popularity in recent years.
A new comedy, Richard Atkins’ “The Men of Mah Jongg,” speaks to the resurgence of the game and the broadening of its appeal. The play starts next Friday night at the Queens Theatre in the Park ([718] 760-0064), where it will run through Dec. 14.
Directed by Tony Award-winner Mark Medoff (“Children of a Lesser God”), Atkins’ bittersweet play is about four aging Jewish male friends, Sid (John Fitzgibbon), Marv (Michael Collins), Harry (Evan Thompson) and Jerry (Joe Jamrog), who cannot get along with each other until they drop their weekly poker game and take up a mah-jongg set that had belonged to one of their late wives. As they play mah-jongg, they come to terms with grief and mortality.
Reached by phone at his home in New Mexico, the playwright said that he was inspired by memories of his mother’s mah-jongg games during his childhood in the Pikesville section of Baltimore. In the play, he said, the game “becomes a conduit for the characters to work out the issues in their relationships. It helps them to get in touch with their more feminine, more sensitive side.”
The idea of men playing mah-jongg may seem faintly ridiculous. But the game was originally played only by men, in the gambling parlors set up in China in 1911 after the founding of the modern Chinese republic. Joseph Babcock, a representative of Standard Oil, brought the game back to America. It caught on like wildfire during the Jazz Age, first in country clubs and then in people’s living rooms.
Jewish women were attracted to the game, historians have noted, because part of the proceeds were earmarked for Hadassah and other charities. And, like Chinese food, it gave off a pungent whiff of the exotic. The premise of Eddie Cantor’s song, “Since Ma is Playing Mah Jong,” performed on Broadway in the 1924 musical, “Kid Boots,” is that his Ma is so infatuated with the game and with Chinese immigrant culture in general that she serves chop suey for dinner every night and drives a laundry wagon.
As Jews retire to an ever-widening array of communities throughout the country, the game continues to make inroads among those of different genders and ethnicities. Mah-jongg tournaments and cruises have proliferated. Both solitaire and group versions are available online.
Mah-jongg may never again occupy the central place that it did in postwar New York. But for now, at least, the tiles still bind.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization