Addiction Is the Stuff of High Drama. In These Plays, So Is Sobriety.

Click here to view original web page at www.nytimes.com

Emon Hassan for The New York Times

You can barely swing an empty bottle in an American theater without hitting a classic tale of the perils of tippling and other bad habits.

There’s Mary Tyrone padding the floors in a morphine haze in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”; George and Martha, battling over the baby and over drinks in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf;” and the Skid Row denizens of “The Iceman Cometh,” always promising to sober up — just not today.

A far rarer sight, however, is what happens after the party is over. But with overdoses at troubling heights and recovery no longer a sotto-voce secret, a new wave of plays dealing with the realities of rehab and the challenges of sobriety have started to emerge, often created by playwrights who have dealt with such problems themselves.

And part of their mission, the writers say, is to destigmatize these struggles.

“I love drunks: I am one, right?” said the playwright Catya McMullen, 32, who has been sober for 16 years. “But these are really just people who feel things deeply.”

McMullen is the author of “Georgia Mertching Is Dead,” which opened last week at the Ensemble Studio Theater and whose three female, 30-something protagonists all became friends while kicking their habits as teenagers, a story that mirrors McMullen’s life.

In Sean Daniels’s autobiographical “The White Chip,” the playwright’s problem is alcohol, something that cost him the top job at the Actors Theater of Louisville in 2011 after he showed up drunk to several events, including a board meeting to consider him for artistic director.

Daniels said he wrote the play’s first monologue as he shook and sweated his way through the earliest days of rehab. “I was just trying to process what was happening with me, just as an exercise to get it out,” said Daniels, 46, who has been sober for eight years.

But, he said, the broader motivation for writing “The White Chip,” which opened Oct. 10 at 59E59 Theaters, was also to fill a void. “When I started out, I said, ‘I’m going to read all the great books and all the great plays about recovery and all the movies,’” Daniels said, “and there’s really not.” He added that he also felt that for many working in theater — a “very wet industry,” as he called it — it could be a difficult place to admit you have a problem.

“I really thought I was the only person in our industry who couldn’t hold their liquor,” he said. “And then once I got sober, like every fourth person came up to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you’re sober, I’ve been sober for 11 years.’ And part of me was like, ‘Listen, I’m so happy for you, but where were you two years ago when I was struggling?’ Why is it such a top-notch secret thing when it would have been great if that had just been part of the conversation?”

Drugs and alcohol aren’t the only addictions being plumbed for dramatic effect. “Octet,” a well-received a cappella musical by Dave Malloy that opened at the Signature Theater Company last spring, is set in a 12-step program for internet addicts. It’s a topic Malloy found himself writing about after noticing his own increasing time online. “I tend to make work on things that I’m obsessed with,” he said.

Although he isn’t in recovery, Malloy said he visited a variety of addiction groups for research, including those dealing with sex and love, which commonly overlap with people who are addicted to pornography.

“What I was most moved by in going to recovery meetings was just the empathy in the room, the way that people listened to each other,” Malloy said. “Just the process of seeing yourself in all these stories was pretty powerful.”

An internet-based recovery group was featured in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s “Water by the Spoonful,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2012. As his title suggests, the playwright Adam Bock said he decided to set his recovery play, “Before the Meeting,” outside the actual 12-step process, though the central character — an older woman working hard to keep sober — delivers a 25-minute monologue to what seems like a group of fellow drinkers.

“I was interested in writing about what happens after you stop drinking,” Bock said. “I am interested in how you live that way.” (He wouldn’t say whether his own experiences shaped his play, which appeared at the Williamstown Theater Festival in August, but did say, “I don’t drink, and I know a lot of people who don’t.”)

Both McMullen and Daniels said that they had written their plays to humanize the people suffering from addiction. McMullen noted that in auditions for “Georgia Mertching,” many actors immediately lapsed into heavily rural accents. “There’s this immediate assumption of class because they were addicts,” she said.

McMullen’s play is a bawdy comedy set on a road trip to the funeral of another former addict, but it still touches on the challenges of staying straight. (“I’m exhausted by the amount of work it takes for me to be a normal person every day,” says one character, herself dealing with a new addiction to sex.)

Daniels said he wanted to encourage “a shame-free conversation about where we are” in terms of national problems with opiates, alcohol and other substances.

“Everybody who comes to it has an uncle, a brother, a cousin, a father,” Daniels said. “Everybody is touched by it, and yet we don’t talk about it.”

Daniels, who crashed a car while drunk and destroyed his marriage but rebounded to land the artistic director’s job at the Arizona Theater Company, even included a list of possible warning signs about drinking at the back of his manuscript, which he said some audience members have asked for “because they have someone they want to read it.” (“Laundry is a several day process” is one such sign of trouble, as well as this: “You use a Brita filter to make your cheap vodka healthier.”)

The playwrights’ good intentions notwithstanding, the topic of recovery brings some specific dramatic challenges. Sobriety is an ongoing effort that often lacks a clear victory.

“The conventional form of Western stories — beginning, middle, end — doesn’t do addiction stories terribly well because recovery, in particular, doesn’t have a concrete end point,” said Duncan Macmillan, the author of the 2015 play “People, Places & Things,” a harrowing story of a young actress trying to shake off a range of addictions. “Its just something you live with and do every day, every hour, for the rest of your life.”

Macmillan, who declined to say whether he himself was in recovery, added that “addicts and people in recovery have been really badly served in film, TV and theater” because “a protagonist in a story who is battling with addiction, you need them to either be definitely fixed, which isn’t particularly accurate, in terms of the experience of living with addiction, or they just die.”

“Or,” he added, “they become a kind of a running joke: someone always drunk showing up somewhere.” (The movie “Arthur” jumps to mind.)

The title “People, Places & Things” comes from the three elements that are said to often trigger relapse. Macmillan’s play features plenty of the jargon familiar to those in treatment, including a scene in which Emma, the actress careering through a breakdown — losing the plot while performing “The Seagull” — before seeking help. It is not a clean break; her first interaction with an addiction doctor is less than cooperative.

“Drugs and alcohol have never let me down,” Emma says. “They have always loved me. There are substances I can put into my bloodstream that make the world perfect. That is the only absolute truth in the universe. I’m being difficult because you want to take it away from me.”

Still, Macmillan said that audiences — particularly in the United States, where the production played at St. Ann’s Warehouse — rooted for the character’s recovery. He said his lead actress, Denise Gough, who played Emma, recounted to him that she had been approached by shaken people saying they had quit drinking after seeing the show. The cast also discussed the show in recovery centers and performed it for addicts and therapists during its development and production in London, an experience he called “incredibly humbling and instructive.”

The unspoken dramatic question hanging over many of these plays is simple: Will the addict overcome the addiction? In most recovery plays, they do, though the looming danger of relapse was part of Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive With You,” at Playwrights Horizons last year. The play’s characters include a father and son, both in recovery.

Lucas, 68, has been sober for a decade and a half, and agreed that the disastrous drunk or drug user can be a compelling character.

“People behaving badly is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun,” Lucas said, singling out Mary Tyrone’s troubles in Eugene O’Neill’s classic. “‘Long Day’s Journey’ isn’t any good if Mom doesn’t show up going, ‘I was so happy for a time,’” he said. “If she doesn’t come in looking like Ophelia on crack, there’s no play.”

But he quickly added that sober life — and theater — has much to offer, too. Indeed, like many alcoholics, he said, the characters in “I Was Most Alive” are dealing with powerlessness, and “learning to live gracefully with what life presents you.”

“Whatever the boulder in the road is,” he said, “you wrap your arms around it.”