ADDICTION ON STAGE
Alcoholism and addiction have been explored in many shows at Roundabout throughout the years.
Most recently, Mary Flynn (played by Jessie Austrian) in the Sondheim/Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along (2019) is a woman whose dreams were crushed (career-wise and romantically), and she thus relies on the bottle to get through the day. When we first see her, we encounter a woman defined by addiction while her friends encourage her to sober up: behavior that was once fun is now a liability as the characters have entered different phases of their adult lives. As the show moves backward through the decades, the weight of addiction (physically and metaphorically) gets peeled away, and we see the person Mary was before alcohol misuse took its toll.
Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey Into Night Photo: Joan Marcus
Another recent look at the ravages of addiction is found in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, staged in 2016 at the American Airlines Theatre
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The Country Girl (staged in 1990, starring Karen Allen and David Rasche), also dove into marriage made destructive by an alcoholic spouse.
WEISSBERGER THEATER GROUP JAY HARRIS, PRODUCER
PETER MANNING AND
ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY PRESENT
THE WEISSBERGER THEATER GROUP PRODUCTION OF
SIDE MAN WITH KEVIN GEER
A NEW PLAY BYWARREN LEIGHT
WENDY MAKKENA MICHAEL MASTRO ROBERT SELLA JOSEPH LYLE TAYLOR ANGELICA TORN FRANK WOOD
SET DESIGN BY NEIL PATEL COSTUME DESIGN BY TOM BROECKER LIGHTING DESIGN BY KENNETH POSNER SOUND DESIGN BY RAY SCHILKE PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR JAY ADLER PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER ANDREA J. TESTANI CASTING BY JIM CARNAHAN/MATT MESSINGER GENERAL MANAGER ELLEN RICHARD DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT/PUBLIC AFFAIRS JULIA C. LEVY PRESS REPRESENTATIVE BONEAU/BRYAN-BROWN DIRECTOR OF MARKETING DAVID B. STEFFEN
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL MAYER 1530 BRO ADW A Y A T 45TH STREET Roundabout Theatre . Jessica
Lange delivered a Tony-winning performance as long-suffering Mary Tyrone. The play broadly explores the numbing quality of drug and alcohol misuse on a tight-knit family, with each member impacted by addiction: both his/her own struggle and the amplification of the disease onto the family members.
In 2013, Roundabout staged Clifford Odets’s play The Big Knife, which centers on Hollywood insider Charlie Castle (played by Bobby Cannavale), who is involved in a fatal car crash and whose world spins out of control as he uses alcohol to fuel his anger and fear of exposure. An earlier Odets play,
Karen Allen in The Country Girl Photo: Martha Swope
Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land, staged at Roundabout in 1994, starred Jason Robards, Jr. and Christopher Plummer in the roles of Hirst and Spooner. The men presumably meet at a local pub, with Spooner accompanying Hirst to his apartment to continue drinking. As the night unfolds and the heavy drinking blurs the dialogue and action, the relationship between the two becomes unclear (do they already know each other?), and the world they inhabit gets washed in confusion and blame.•
For more information on the Roundabout Archives, visit
https://archive.roundabouttheatre.org or contact Tiffany Nixon, Roundabout Archivist, at
archives@roundabouttheatre.org
22 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY
Side Man, Warren Leight’s memory play about a jazz musician’s life as seen through the eyes of his son, Clifford, and his alcoholic wife, Terry (staged at Roundabout in 1998), is another example of the alcoholic parent/spouse. The play focuses on the decline of jazz “side men” and the lasting bond of those musicians, but it also looks closely at a family broken apart by substance abuse.
Poster art for Side Man. Illustration by Scott McKowen.
Jason Robards amd Christopher Plummer in No Man's Land Photo: Carol Rosegg
Poster by Scott McKowen • Nappi/ Eliran/Murphy Ltd.
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