It’s hard to know—or perhaps it’s even tougher to acknowledge—that you’re drinking too much. After all, you could just be the life of the party. The kind who orders half the menu during a dinner for two, using every cocktail or wine glass as a kind of rhythm, a pause between courses, prolonging the night and adding to its enjoyment. After three, or maybe four drinks, neon signs begin to soften with a warm familiarity, and the lights scattered across bridges (visible from the backseat of your car as you proceed to the next gathering) calmly blanket the water, extending an invitation of tranquility.
Alcohol might give you the courage to express yourself, might enhance your charm. It might lift a veil, letting you connect more deeply with others and your own senses. As Seamus Heaney once penned:
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
If that bright flame makes you too wild now and then, makes you wake up with a tart taste in your mouth, having forgotten how you ended up in bed, and you start to measure hangovers in weeks instead of mornings . . . who can say? You might’ve just had a bad month. You’ve been looking for light.
One such fun-loving innocent is Joe Clay (Brian d’Arcy James), the rascal whose penchant for drink is the igniting spark of “Days of Wine and Roses,” a new musical at Studio 54, directed by Michael Greif—based on the play by J. P. Miller from 1958 and the Blake Edwards film from 1962—with a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. We first meet Joe at a work event in nineteen-fifties New York, a glass of amber liquid in hand, chatting up his boss’s pretty, new secretary, Kirsten Arnesen (Kelli O’Hara). Joe’s a Korean War veteran, recently back Stateside. Kirsten’s the daughter of a taciturn Norwegian. She grew up on a farm; her wit is city-ready.
It’s easy to see what part alcohol plays in Joe’s life. It spurs on his charmer’s flirty patter and makes him bold when the moment’s ripe for risk. From the start, Joe—pure personality—is fixated on wooing Kirsten. Early on, she lets slip that she doesn’t drink. He seems to take it as a challenge. Soon we see them at dinner. He feeds her a sweet drink, and she doesn’t hate it as much as she thought she would. The buzz is nice. A horror story begins.
Guettel’s music sets a tipsy, disorienting mood. The show—a tale of two drunks and their dangerous passage through the years—stays emotionally plausible because it never allows itself to burst into anthemic songs that could be plucked out of context and placed on the pop charts. Instead, O’Hara and James sing tilting lines of chromatic melody. Here, music is a way of communicating the topsy-turvy logic of a long night and its sloppy seductions. Drunkenness has a whole sensorium of its own: just from the sound—and the smooth, swaying conducting of the show’s music director, Kimberly Grigsby, visible on a perch stage right—you can almost smell the air of certain rooms, sour with booze and smoke.
When Joe and Kirsten are at their most happily plastered, flying high over their worries and the widening chasm of their shared problem, they indulge in a cheerful ditty. They’re shuffling among drinks, pulling spirit after spirit out of bags, singing a pure-hearted ode to champagne, with its “little evanescent bubbles erasing everything!” It’s all about the narrowing enclosure of a relationship circumscribed by addiction—the type of giddy love that starts to slide downward as soon as it hits its crest:
Two dolphins breakin’ a wave
Two dolphins right to the grave . . .
Sometimes I feel like I am riding on an arrow
On the needle of a compass
Spinning counterclockwise
Just a gust of air
With all this water everywhere
I’m leaning out the window
I’m running with a knife
I’m riding on an arrow
I’m running for my life
What’s the worry
I have you now
You are all I need
It’s a happy, seasick song that accentuates the strong voices of both singers. While they woozily harmonize and belt, they dance. Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia have choreographed evocative, efficient, droll numbers that call to mind old show-biz glamour, and also the dark-edged phrase “high functioning”—how a pair of really fizzy drunks can look and feel great while spinning ever closer to the brink.
But this kind of fun never lasts. The night slumps, a short life becomes a half-conscious montage, ice waters down your drink and you order another too quickly on its heels. Joe and Kirsten have a baby, and their unfitness for their new roles as parents becomes immediately apparent.
The show is best—and the whole thing is quite good—when it demonstrates how alcohol, trickily liquid, can fill the spaces in a relationship, helping to bring it together but also inevitably driving it apart. That great time starts to stink if you can’t stop going back to the well. Soon it’s time to look around and start over.
One of the subtler touches of the lighting in “Days of Wine and Roses” is how it eventually gives the audience a sense of the daytime, once Joe gets sober and acquires an A.A. sponsor (played by a warm-spirited David Jennings). Most of Joe and Kirsten’s story unfolds at night, that dark cloak for excess, but drying up lets a bit of sunshine in. So does having someone to talk to outside the household. Broaden your circle and brighten up a tad. “The Animal Kingdom,” a new play by Ruby Thomas, at the Connelly Theatre, directed by Jack Serio, takes place entirely within a group-therapy setting, showing how talk can be a balm, even if only for a while.
Sam (Uly Schlesinger), a troubled college student, fresh off an attempt at taking his own life, is now living at a rehab institution. He’s smart, intense, and full of nervous energy. His counsellor, Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith), provides a counterpoint to Sam’s obvious physical discomfort: Daniel is snappily dressed, in a brown-orange sweater and matching socks, his loafers giving off a slight shine; he’s warm where Sam is defensively cool, ever more patient when Sam seems about to snap. They’re in a room with a two-way mirror—the only room in this willfully claustrophobic play.
The narrative progresses throughout six obligatory sessions with Sam’s family. This includes Sam’s garrulous mother (Tasha Lawrence), his reticent father (David Cromer), and his apprehensively cordial younger sister (Lily McInerny) who offers a captivating performance. They all share their views and emotions, providing a biography of sorts for Sam and giving insight into the family dynamics, both current and inherited, that likely led them to this melancholy juncture. Avoiding too much sentimentality or gratuitous display of suffering is challenging in such a play, yet Thomas’s flexible and compassionate writing manages to strike a balance.
Sam is a queer individual dealing with an inherent sense of sorrow, but it’s important to note that he’s also a privileged character and he’s aware of this reality. A part of what troubles him is his family’s wealth. His father, who hails from an unpretentious upbringing, conducts corporate takeovers scavenging companies for any residual assets that can be sold. His son, more delicate and against capitalist tendencies, wishes to distance himself from these actions despite them funding his education and his time in the facility. Probably, in this situation, Daniel’s presence is the highest privilege for Sam. Smith, who plays Daniel, excels with a tactile toughness that permeates beyond the stage reaching out to the audience. He delivers a performance that’s admirable for its lucidity and a sense of affection. His impeccable friendliness serves as a reminder that beyond all kinds of sufferings, what truly heals are the human voices, though they can be difficult to attain but once accessed, they offer comfort, always ready to alleviate pain.
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