Theatre in Review: Another Shot (Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Gregg Mozgala, Dan Butler. Photo: Joan Marcus

Another Shot, a comic drama about life in rehab, doesn't become engaging until it stops trying to entertain. Harry, the protagonist, hosts a Chicago sports radio program, using his gift of gab to convert his drinking problem into a comic routine. (Playwright Harry Teinowitz, here telling the story of his life aided by co-author Spike Manton, is a former standup comic, and it shows.) Admitting to drinking during hockey games, he cracks, "I always thought my cutoff point should've been the start of the third period. I was wrong. My cutoff point should've been my twenty-first birthday." Stopped by a cop who asks, "Are you drinking?" Harry responds "Why? Are you buying?" When, following a DUI that gets him temporarily kicked off the air, Harry arrives at the recovery home, his emergency contact information is reviewed by Barb, his counselor. "Please tell me it's Frankie, the bartender," he says. "I have your wife, Wendy," Barb replies. "Frankie's more forgiving," Harry insists.

Not even ten minutes into the action, we've arrived at my-wife-doesn't-understand-me jokes, as if Henny Youngman still walked the earth. When it comes to indulging in counterproductive gagging, however, Harry is not alone. Isaiah, another inpatient, tells this one: "Well, I knew a guy who would only drink when he went home to Ireland." "And?" Harry asks. "He moved back to Ireland." You can practically hear the rimshot after that one, also when Harry cracks, "I'm just not good with all the damn therapy. Feels like a colonoscopy in the middle of a food court." To be clear, most of these tired quips are meant to show that flippant humor is a useless defense against the hard facts of alcoholism. But we still have to hear them.

This is too bad because Another Shot risks alienating the audience before introducing a set of characters who compellingly bear witness to the ravages of addiction. In a quietly hair-raising passage, Vince, a husband and father, explains why his young daughters no longer speak to him: Fed up with the attention paid to their pet hamsters, he let the little creatures go. He was drunk and doesn't remember doing it, of course, but he had the motive and opportunity. It's a quietly stunning moment: Vince hasn't beaten anyone nor caused any physical damage; instead, he has committed a simple, breathtakingly cruel, act that shatters the bond between him and his girls.

In another enlightening scene, Andrea, the only woman in the group, bitterly calls out a double standard for drunks: "A man goes out for drinks after work, he is blowing off steam. A woman goes out for drinks, I am a party girl, asking for trouble, trash." Recalling that she begged her best female drinking buddy to go into treatment with her, she says, "She turned me down flat; she was afraid they would take away her kids. And she was right. Did you worry about that Harry when you checked in? Did that even cross your mind, Vince?"

As Another Shot relaxes its hold on sitcom one-liners, we start to care for these beat-up souls who fight for sobriety daily, even hourly, painfully aware that the abyss is only one step away. Aiding this effort is the first-rate cast assembled by director Jackson Gay. As Harry, a more benign version of Bulldog, his recurring character in the series Frasier, Dan Butler is forced to work the room too hard at first. But he develops an unexpected vulnerability as he grasps his gnawing dependency on booze, especially when facing a devastating medical diagnosis and, later, tearing up over a drawing made, for a school psychologist, by his daughter, documenting the fear and rage she feels for her absent father.

Employing a three-sided audience arrangement at the Signature Center's Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, scenic designer Beowulf Boritt transforms it into an anonymous institutional space, defined by cement-block walls and worn-out furniture, that looks thoroughly authentic. Alejo Vietti's costumes feel exactly right for each character. Mextly Couzin's lighting is stark when it needs to be, turning flamboyant with saturated colors and chases during the scene changes. The transitions also feature Daniel Baker & Co.'s sound design and Stefania Bulbarella's projections, both expertly done but regrettably deployed in facetious, sometimes hokey, testimonies from AA members. (Gags about a drunk ventriloquist? Really?)

Even in its best passages, the characters' comings and goings can feel a little too smoothly engineered, and a revelation about Barb is visible from miles away. Then again, the authors have a wrenching twist to deploy near the end, making horrendously clear how easy it is to fall off the wagon. Their conclusion is undeniably moving and, when they dig into the gritty details of getting sober, they can be very funny -- for example, the evening ritual devoted to watching repeats of Cheers (the episode in which Sam relapses is a favorite) or the moment when the others contemplate Harry's DUI photo in the newspaper, deciding it rivals Nick Nolte's infamous mug shot. At these moments, Another Shot earns its dark sense of humor; to really succeed, however, it should find a splint for its sprained funnybone. --David Barbour