What does it mean to be extraordinary? After meeting Bill Wilson, a New York stockbroker in the late 1920s, neither he nor the life he leads rings as remarkable. That’s also true for Dr. Bob Smith, a career surgeon in Akron, Ohio during the same period. They’re both men pushing through life with a particularly pernicious anchor around their necks that’s destroying them. Bill W. and Dr. Bob, extended to late April at the Biograph Theater, reveals how two unlikely people were able to come together to save each other. They would later go on help millions of others around the world become the rescuers of their own lives by creating Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
Written by Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey, Bill W. and Dr. Bob rolls out as a series of telling vignettes that center on both men’s lives and the lives of those closest to them. Detailing the inception, progression and consequences of their reliance on alcohol, the playwrights’ carefully provide a detailed picture of how the disease affects families as well the individuals caught in its snares. Ronnie Marmo, who credits AA for saving his own life, plays Bill W. and directs this engrossing effort.
We first get an up-close view of Wilson and his wife, Lois (Janelle Marmo), as a young married couple in striver mode with the classic aspirations of newlyweds. To work together to build a comfortable life and start a family. Then scene by scene, we’re shown why that will likely never happen. A person who remembered what alcohol did to his grandfather and father, Wilson wishfully told himself he would never succumb to the same demon. But for him, like many of us, it’s the very thing we desire most to reject that we embrace most vehemently. It’s not long before we find him reduced, repeatedly, to drunken oblivion. And we watch Lois, whose despair has hardened into something coarse, retreat more and more from her newlywed dreams. Resignation morphs into resentment and her pleas turn into demands. “Find a job!” Something even the sober and focused found hard pressed to do in Depression era New York. Janelle Marmo excels in her depiction of a woman stretched to limits she never envisioned enduring. The play doesn’t dig into the kind of loyalty that makes someone stay in a desperate relationship. But it does reveal how exasperated resolve can sometimes produce positive effects, however temporary. Clean for a stretch of days, Wilson’s confident when he walks into a bar for camaraderie. Declining to order a drink, he confesses to another man there that if he had one, he’d have countless more, and for that reason he’d have none. A free drink for both men from the waitress was all it took to shatter his will and send him down his familiar spiral, this time landing him in the hospital to detox.
Ronnie Marmo as Bill W. and Katherine Wettermann as Lois Wilson – Cortney Roles photography
Often episodic, battles with addiction are fraught with highs and lows where periods of abstinence are followed by devastating lapses. For Wilson, his last slide was so frightening that after his release he returned to Oxford Group, a non-denominational and altruistic organization that embraced a spiritual solution to alcoholism. A friend, also an alcoholic, had introduced him to the group that’s considered a precursor to AA. Benefiting so much from his second encounter with Oxford, he zealously recruited others to join him with noteworthy success. Shortly afterward, a new job possibility in Akron offered an opportunity to restore him professionally. But it also threatened to upend the progress he’d made with his addiction. At his core, Wilson understood that “only another drunk could help a drunk”. Leaving New York without a support system would be catastrophic. That knowledge drove him to search for and find someone like himself, another alcoholic, who he could recruit to join him in his daily struggle to hold on to sobriety.
Anyone who’s been through AA and recovery knows this story well. Many of them have been filling the Richard Christensen Theater upstairs at the Biograph since early March to see it re-enacted. Without the providential circumstances that were about to unfold in Bill W. and Dr. Bob, many of them may not have been able to live the full lives they were currently relishing.
Like Wilson, Dr. Bob Smith (Rick Yaconis) wasn’t a stereotypical alcoholic. Rather, he was the opposite of how we envision someone lost to drink. The trappings of happiness that Wilson’s wife, Lois, dreamed of; career, family and community standing, Smith and his wife, Anne (Cynthia Suarez) possessed. Misery comprised their common bond with the Wilson’s. The ravages of alcohol simply expressed itself differently in the Smith household. Older and more entrenched in his prison, it took a lot of convincing for Smith to even attempt to follow Wilson’s lead. But, as we see continually throughout the dramatization, Wilson’s gift for persuasion was formidable. According to Smith’s wife, Anne, “he could talk a dog off a meat wagon”. Although harrowing, and with the steadfastness of Wilson’s commitment to him, Smith made it across his Rubicon. That they didn’t stop with their personal success, but initiated a two-man campaign to help others is what makes them and their story extraordinary. Watching them seek out, engage and convince others, with realistically uneven results, to shed their alcoholic identities was fascinating. Phil Aman, who played a number of supportive roles including a brusquely recalcitrant alcoholic lawyer, added energetic dimension to all of his scenes. Both he and Marla Seidell, who also occupied several accompanying roles, showcased the wonders of a talented actor’s versatility in a single performance. Yaconis as Dr. Bob filled his character with infectious vitality and natural authenticity. And there was a smoldering intellect and subtle grace that Ms. Marmo brought to Lois that radiated purpose and fortitude. For his part, Ronnie Marmo endowed Bill W. with characteristic intensity and wit. And as director, made a well-known, beloved and immensely consequential story feel brand new.
Bill W. and Dr. Bob
Through April 28th
Thursday – Sunday
Theatre 68
Venue: Biograph Theater
2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
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