[NEohioPAL] Review of "Bill W. and Dr. Bob" at CPH

[Bob Abelman]

Alcoholics Anonymous tale finds a port in the storm

 

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review appeared in the News-Herald 4/23/10

 

Bill W. and Dr. Bob, currently playing at the Cleveland Play House, is the perfect storm. 

 

The play is a bio-drama-a true tale about the alcoholic New York stock broker, Bill Wilson, and the alcoholic Akron surgeon, Dr. Bob Smith, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s and pioneered its 12-step treatment for alcoholism.

 

Bio-dramas tend to be dialogue-driven enterprises, relaying their many facts and figures through wordy exchanges and rambling reflections.  

 

Bill W. and Dr. Bob is a message play.  It proselytizes the merits of AA's then-revolutionary position that alcoholism is a disease, an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body.

 

Dramatic tension and dramatic arc tend to be in short supply in message plays.  

 

The playwrights, Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey, are a physician and a psychologist whose storytelling is more clinical than creative.  Bill W. and Dr. Bob consists of brief vignettes strung together, each offering up an interesting but isolated revelation.

 

Collectively, they provide little in the way of theatricality. 

 

Fortunately, the CPH's Ohio premiere production of this wordy, preachy and stilted off-Broadway play is superb.  This perfect storm has found a worthy port to lay anchor.

 

Under the astute direction of Seth Gordon, this play flies at breakneck speed.  By infusing this production with precise and purposeful movement, quick tempo and seamless set changes, the series of vignettes flow from one to the next and create a greater sense of fluidity and forward momentum than what appears on the page. 

 

By creating a permanent set where the walls consist of hundreds of liquor bottles, scenic designer Robert Mark Morgan clearly establishes the omnipresence of alcohol in the lives of Bill W., Dr. Bob and the sober victims who love them.  Every action of every character is influenced by alcohol as they enter from, weave around, and exit through this towering glass menagerie.   Light hits the players only after being refracted through these bottles.

 

Flaws and foibles in the script are bypassed or bested by six wonderful actors.  They speed through the verbosity while still managing to capture key moments and the essence of the real people they play.  

 

Sean Patrick Reilly relays the inner pain, raging ego, and impassioned energy with which Bill W. approached his fellow alcoholics on the road to their recovery.  Timothy Crowe masterfully depicts Dr. Bob's vulnerability under the influence but strength of character and conviction when dry.  Both performers transform the comic relief provided by the playwrights into truly poignant moments.  

 

Denise Cormier and Margaret Daly, as the long-suffering wives of these AA founders, are also wonderful.  They find multidimensionality in characters that are simply drawn, as do Heather Anderson Boll and Charles Kartali as assorted people who cross paths with Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Boll and Kartali are particularly strong as the first couple whose lives were successfully transformed by Bill W. and Dr. Bob's innovative methods.


Bill W. and Dr. Bob won the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency Performing Arts Award in 2007, which speaks more for its message than its merit as a piece of theatrical  entertainment.  This CPH production relays this very important message, and does so in a very entertaining manner.  

 

Bill W. and Dr. Bob continues through May 9 in The Cleveland Play House's Bolton Theatre.  For tickets, which range from $44 to $64, call 216-795-7000 or visit www.clevelandplayhouse.com.

 
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