It never rains but it pours. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t pour rain. What’s poured instead is scotch, bourbon, rum, and beer. Only days ago, the musicalized Days of Wine and Roses, in which Kirsten Arnesen and Joe Clay indulge in an alcoholic maelstrom, opened. Now The White Chip, which had a 2019 Manhattan run, returns with a drinks-dependent Steven holding back no detail in his liquor-soaked story.
Sean Daniels is the author of this unyielding autobiographical reminiscence — autobiographical because Steven reports achievements as an actor, director and having spent much theater time in Kentucky. Daniels himself has a parallel career history and so has chosen, as a recovering Alcoholics Anonymous member, to herald his evidently personal history.
It may be that Daniels uses the name “Steven” in observance of the rule that AA members always remain anonymous. So, it’s the unflaggingly animated Joe Tapper as Steven who steps out at lights up to address the audience, immediately announcing he sipped his first beer when he was 12.
He proceeds to take the audience through a growing addiction that includes crashing his car into a pole, a regularly threatened first marriage, eventually attending an AA meeting (where he received a white chip on surrendering to his problem), a 70-day sobriety achievement, sobriety slips too numerous to count, finally remaining sober for five years, and still counting.
Throughout, Tapper is joined by Crystal Dickinson, identified in the program as #1, and Jason Tam, identified as #2. They play everyone else in Steven’s past, so many characters that the impersonations may add up to an equivalent of Steven’s multiple slips. Among rapidly coming-and-going others, they’re Steven’s parents — his stern mother, and his benevolent father, who in time develops Parkinson’s Disease and dies. The chameleon-like Dickinson and Tam also appear as people who attempt to help him stop drinking and people who attempt him to resume. They pop up all over scenic designer Lawrence E. Moten III’s classroom with its large, repeatedly used blackboard.
Cheers for their accomplishments to Tapper, Dickinson, Tam, director Sheryl Kaller (who’s been associated with the work for some time), costumer Devario Simmons and certainly props handler Caitlin Murphy. Kaller keeps everything at a whippersnapper pace. The cheerful — often in the face of dire developments — Tapper is commanding start to finish, especially as Steven desperately digs up unceasing explanations for why he’s not alcoholic. Quick-changing Dickinson and Tam are unfailingly on top of the constant specific requirements.
Note that while much of Steven’s story is grim, humorous moments often emerge, some coming from genuinely honest moments in his past, some not. Too frequently Daniels has Steven’s astringent mom cutting him off with a “Fuck you.” After the first utterance, it ceases to be amusing, only becoming forced.
The revived presentation of The White Chip is strong as a play, but it ought to be pointed out that there’s something else operating, an aspect of the strong work that perhaps hasn’t previously been articulated. Members of 12-Step organizations are aware that the last step stipulates:“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
Daniels most likely regards The White Chip as his way, even his obligation, to act on the twelfth step. If it hasn’t crossed his mind, he’s doing so anyway. He’s delivering what’s known in 12-step gatherings as a “qualification.”
“Qualification”? Many, if not most, 12-Step meetings get under way when one member, usually having at least 90 days sober, addresses the group with a 20-minute-or-so talk about his or her drinking, often including a bottoming-out episode as well as a mention of the joy at recovering. The objective is establishing a qualification for membership.
Isn’t that precisely what Steven does when he comes forward and commences his talk, giving the hard facts? Likely, AA audience members at The White Chip will instantly recognize what’s going on, will know they’re listening to yet one more qualification with its abundant individual specifics and its simultaneous generalities, its inevitable extremely low lows and embarrassing or genuine highs.
Of course, those observers won’t have heard many, if any, qualifications that go on for 90 minutes, which this one does—and does well, possibly even reaching the eyes and ears of anyone out there for whom Alcoholics Anonymous particulars are unfamiliar, anyone out there for whom the twelfth step might do some great good.
An AA-loyal friend once told me, “I’ve never heard a qualification that wouldn’t be improved by being shorter.” Daniels, Kaller and company get away with it.
The White Chip opened February 1, 2024, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through March 9. Tickets and information: whitechipplay.org
