No matter what you may think about Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and the organization’s 12-step method of achieving sobriety, the positive impact of the group on millions remains unquestionable and beyond admirable. And at the core of that success sits a strange notion, that the only people who can truly help an alcoholic are other alcoholics.
It’s this discovery that we witness in “Bill W. and Dr. Bob,” a play about the origins of A.A. by Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey first produced in 2007 and receiving its Chicago premiere under the auspices of star and director Ronnie Marmo’s Theatre 68. It’s performed in repertory with Marmo’s returning one-man show, “I’m not a Comedian … I’m Lenny Bruce” at the upstairs venue of the Biograph Theater. (Welcome back!)
Marmo plays Bill Wilson, a stockbroker and self-professed drunk who found himself one day in 1935 traveling in Akron, Ohio, alone and craving a visit to the hotel bar. By then, having been in and out of care and informed with the then-rare insight his addiction was a disease, the one thing Bill knew was that he needed help. In this telling, he picks up the phone and starts making calls, looking for another alcoholic he could talk to. He ended up finding Dr. Bob Smith, a local surgeon experiencing his own bottle-driven bottom after years of trying to stay sober.
This fateful meeting of two native Vermonters led to a new movement, and the notion presented is that this synergistic combination of a salesman and a scientist willed it into being through a combination of zeal and pluck and, above all, the sense that if they didn’t keep spreading their sobriety to others, they might lose it themselves.
Before getting into the aesthetic insufficiencies here — and I found those pretty defining — it’s important to acknowledge that there are more important things than art. There were some members in the audience on opening night — those who participated in responding “Hi Bill” when Marmo starts the play with the line, “I’m Bill and I’m an alcoholic” — who were clearly drawn to the theater because the men being depicted have had a deeply personal influence on their lives. And these audience members likely picked up on the many “Easter eggs” scattered throughout about how the prevailing A.A. philosophies might have first come into being.
That said, the writing has the raw quality of the inexperienced, packed with good intentions but lacking in craft. Shem and Surrey are husband and wife. He’s a physician and novelist; she’s a psychologist and author of a book about Buddhism. This is their only play, and I did wonder if perhaps they had initially conceived it for television, because it’s written in a series of short scenes that don’t have any particular rhythm or style. The only theatrical quality comes from the fact that, in addition to the leading men (Steve Gelder plays Dr. Bob opposite Marmo’s Bill) and their wives (Katherine Wettermann and Elizabeth Rude), there’s a wide range of other characters played by the same actors (Marla Seidell and Phil Aman).
Scenes of drunkenness can be awfully hard and can lend themselves to a type of light comedy, a trap that this play and production tend to fall into, particularly in the depiction of Dr. Bob. Although there’s a real effort made to show the destructive horrors of alcoholism on families — the impact on the wives here is the most affecting part — there’s also a desire to find humor in some things that in this context shouldn’t be funny, such as the potential effect of Bob’s drinking on his surgery patients.
This same problematic use of comic relief emerges when Seidell and Aman delineate their varied characters with broad effects. The depictions can come off as condescending, particularly toward the members of the Oxford Group, a predecessor of A.A. that was led by non-alcoholic Christians, who may have been ineffective but were equally well-meaning.
As director, Marmo infuses the play — extremely bare, with just a table and four chairs — with an abundance of period music and a whole lot of lighting cues. Unfortunately, that seems to place emphasis on the superficial.
This is a play where the potential appeal is feeling like we get deep, human insight into two historically significant, unlikely figures: so deeply flawed, so hurtful to their loved ones, and ultimately so positively influential. We don’t get that here. “Bill W. and Dr. Bob” is about the possibilities of personal transformation, but in this production the characters’ inner journeys feel flat.
