“The White Chip,” a one-act play at Marin Theatre, might easily have slipped into being an “alcohol-is-evil” sermon if not for the skills of playwright Sean Daniels and director Lance Gardner. They don’t allow more than a few seconds to pass without a funny one-liner or a funny physical gag. Elements of addiction and recovery, the fast-paced show’s main motifs, are quasi-autobiographical for both.
The show is buttressed by stellar acting by Benjamin Clark as Steven, an on-again, off-again, self-destructive drunk; and Lyndsy Kail and Danny Scheie, a two-person battalion of swift-change, often humorous characters.
Steven, who works relentlessly to grab theatrical success on Broadway, relies on booze binges trying to escape inescapable pressures. Making a good choice is a difficult task for him, except perhaps when he must pick either “the fat Elvis or the skinny Elvis” to be in his Las Vegas wedding party.
The nerdy protagonist chronologically revisits his life on the treacherous road to recovery, defensively citing famed alcoholic playwrights, then rhetorically asking the audience if it would really “want to read a sober Jack Kerouac or a sober Hunter S. Thompson.”
One of the funniest bits is a slapstick sequence in which white chips — from Alcoholics Anonymous, signifying 24 hours of sobriety or, indeed, simply a desire to stop imbibing — are flung around the stage as if they’d been shot from a cannon.
Steven refers to his “lifetime love affair” with the bottle, especially vodka, because it’s not detectable on the drinker’s breath. He darts from New York to Florida to Kentucky, blacking out more than once. And he details a string of accidents, arrests and relapses. But he also pinpoints moments of sheer joy and interrupts his trek to the bottom when he finds both his higher power and help from Jewish alcoholics, whose sense of humor is healing.
Those moments are opposite to his “imprisonment” in a reboot camp.
Meanwhile, Scheie, with excellent accents and facial mugging, adroitly races between being Steven’s frail father, a spunky airport bartender, a curt German interloper and a kid with squeaky voice and baseball cap turned sideways.
And Kail is so good at what she does, there’s never a question of whether she’s portraying Steven’s mom, who constantly greets him with f-bombs, or one of his multiple girlfriends, or other characters who become real with a flip of her hair or a wide-eyed expression.
Also, both Scheie and Kail imitate the voices in Steven’s head, two cats, and, hilariously, walls and doors of a moving elevator.
The show boasts excellent stagecraft. The set by Christopher Fitzer has a shiny bar with a wall full of bottles that light up for emphasis. Spense Matubang’s lighting, from sensually dim to brilliantly bright, adds drama, and Lisa Townsend’s choreography is sublime, whether in a Keystone Cops-like chase scene or a change-personality moment resulting from a flip of a cap.
“The White Chip,” which runs 1¾ hours with no intermission, might leap from a B-plus to an A-minus if 20-30 minutes were chopped from the second half. Nonetheless, this hard-on-the-tush version is worth a theatergoer’s time. It’s always a tough job to balance comedy and poignancy, and this production does it well.
Marin Theatre’s “The White Chip” continues through Sept. 20 at 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley; tickets are 39 to $110 at www.marintheatre.org.