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Slideshow: The Slutcracker

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Brooklyn and the bottle

As for Eric, never having read the play or seen any other production, I couldn’t determine how much of the problem with the character is in the writing and how much is the result of errors by Warren and director Adam Zahler. He’s notably lacking in warmth, except when he’s fighting to get Nina to take him back. Yes, the play is about a man who has imposed an emotional distance between himself and his past, but he’s also just written an autobiographical novel, and his interactions with Ira and the college student, Alison, would be more complex and interesting if he didn’t come across as so damn unyielding — if he fought his own impulses more rather than closing down so early and then closing down over and over again. Ira is such a wonderful character — and Baltin gives such a marvelous performance — that he winds up telling on Eric in ways that Margulies probably didn’t intend. This man wears all his feelings on his sleeve: tremulous delight at seeing Eric again, anger and jealousy over his abandonment, resentment at the way his own life has turned out, pride at being associated with a famous writer and his popular book, authentic concern over his friend’s problems. He pushes himself onto Eric; he’s too much — you certainly understand why Eric turns down his invitation to Shabbas dinner. But if Eric found it harder to resist the cozy flavor of home Ira holds out, I think I’d have more feeling for him than I did.

At least Brooklyn Boy has characters you can debate about. Bill W. and Dr. Bob, at the New Repertory Theatre’s new Arsenal Center digs (through March 26), has mouthpieces. This play by the husband-and-wife team of Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey dramatizes the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid 1930s, when Bill Wilson (Robert Krakovski), a New York stockbroker struggling to hold onto his recent sobriety, joins forces with Bob Smith (Patrick Husted), an Akron doctor who’s battled every attempt of his wife and her church friends to get him on the wagon. Except that Bergman and Surrey don’t dramatize the story; they just lay it out, in a series of episodes that make their obvious points and then keep going.

Here’s an example. In the middle of act two, Bob’s wife (Kathleen Doyle) and Bill’s wife (Rachel Harker) get the wife of a third alcoholic whom Bill W. and Dr. Bob are trying to enlist in their crusade — drunks helping one another stay sober — to open up about her experiences. At one point Anne Smith admits that it’s the first time in 20 years of marriage she’s had so personal a conversation with another woman. If Bergman and Surrey had a sense of dramatic structure, they’d recognize that the scene has just reached the end of its arc (and that we know what’s coming: the women will begin Al-Anon). Instead, the women go on talking for another seven or eight minutes, repeating the ideas the audience has already comprehended. That’s why Bill W. and Dr. Bob is unconscionably long (over two and a half hours) for a play with so few dramatic ideas and no real characters.

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