DOWN THE HATCH

Alcohol-fuelled catharsis in Des Moines” and Between Riverside and Crazy.”

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

You always learn something new when you watch somebody drink. Not that vino leads to veritas in any literal way—but, over the span of a long, soggy night, small, revealing details, often more gestural than verbal, accumulate. How your fellow-partygoer holds a glass, or how often she takes a drink, or what counts, in her world, as a cocktail: all of this helps you to know her better, to figure out where she’s really coming from. Two recent productions—“Des Moines,” the final play by the late Denis Johnson, from 2007, and a revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy,” from 2014, in its Broadway premiére—feature alcohol as a spur and a guiding presence, a conduit to otherwise fugitive knowledge.

The central event of Des Moines’— directed by Arin Arbus, for Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center—is an impromptu gathering that quickly becomes a drinkfuelled bacchanal. Dan Arliss Howard) and Marta Johanna Day) are an aging couple further aged by sorrows that they find hard to articulate, and by a stubborn but unspoken ambivalence about the substance and meaning of their lives. At the beginning of the play, whose main setting is their kitchen, they’re talking past each other in a way that makes their anomie plain. Dan, a cabdriver, has recently come into contact with Mrs. Drinkwater Heather Alicia Simms), whose husband died in a plane crash. Dan's cab was the last car the poor guy ever rode in. As he tries to relate this story to Marta, she’s more worried about whether he plans to eat a full meal. So is this new diet some sort of spiritual thing?” she asks. Because I made spaghetti. Is this a spiritual pilgrimage you're on, Dan, with the cereal?”