Broadway Bullet Interview: Bill W and Dr. Bob

 We profile the new play "Bill W. and Dr. Bob" and interview playwright Steve Bergman and director Rick Lombardo.

"Bill W. and Dr. Bob" is a comedy about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1929 by a stockbroker and a surgeon. It stars Patrick Husted and Robert Krakovski.

Stephen Bergman was a doctor at Harvard Medical School for thirty years and wrote under the pen-name of "Samuel Shem." His plays "Room for One Woman" and "Napoleon's Dinner" were produced off-off Broadway and his novels have sold over two million copies.

Rick Lombardo is New Rep's Producing Artistic Director for the tenth year. At New Rep he has directed "Romeo and Juliet," "Into the Woods," "Quills," and "Approaching Moomtaj" among others.  

"Bill W. and Dr. Bob" is playing at New World Stages through August 19th. For tickets please visit telecharge . The play was developed by Boston's New Rep , and had a record-breaking run there last year.

You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 105. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.

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Broadway Bullet Interview: Steve Berman and Rick Lombardo of Bill W. and Dr. Bob

 

BB: Hollywood has always been a fan of the buddy movie. On stage, at New World Stages, we have a different sort of buddy play going on, but one that also address a history that whether or not we're directly involved has influenced our lives. The play is called "Bill W. and Dr. Bob" and it is the story of the founders of alcoholics anonymous, and it was a tremendous success at the New Rep Theatre in Boston. It's transferred now to New York and we have one of the playwright Steve Berman and the director Rick Lombardo here in the studio with us. How you doing?

Both: Great. Thank you.

BB: What inspired you, Steve, along with your, wife to write this play?

SB: Well, we both are/were therapists. I used to be a psychiatrist. She is a physiologist and we both ended up working with alcoholics and addicts and their therapy and that led us to discover and learn about Alcoholics Anonymous because I insisted my patients go there: to AA, and then we decided that we wanted to write something together and we came across this story of how these two men were going to die and then through an incredible series of events, call it karma or chance, they were brought together in Akron, Ohio in May of 1935, and they talked for six hours at one meeting, and that led to the whole founding of AA. It was just an incredible American success story of two guys who were going to die and got together and found a way to heal themselves and then that meeting, of course, was replicated and is replicated everyday all over the world. So it was a terrific story that demanded to be written. We were sure somebody must have come across it. No one had come across it, and we decided it had to be done live on stage, because it's guys talking to the audience as the play starts.

BB: Now Rick how did you discover this for your New Rep Theatre Company that you are artistic director for?

RL: Yeah, well, it goes back about three years. Seven and Jan actually live about a mile and a half from my theatres location just outside of Boston. Apparently they had become fans of New Rep and they had seen my work as a director. Actually, the play had its very first reading, before I was at New Rep, but at New Repertory Theatre. Was that something like …

SB: 1990.

RL: So, seventeen years ago, and then it had a few productions around the country in a very different version than the version we are dong now. Steven and Jan asked me to have a cup of coffee with them about three years ago, and said that they were very interested in working on the play again and that there was some possible interest of a production in New York if we could get a successful regional production of the play going and that they were interested in working with me as a director. So I took a look at the play. First of all I was drawn to the play because I did have a very close family member of mine who I saw go successfully into recovery through AA later in life. So I knew the power of transformation that could happen, and then I was really interested in how that would translate into theatrical terms on the stage. I think we worked then for about a year and a half on revision in the text, which led to the production at New Rep almost exactly a year ago to the day of our New York opening. Quickly it became the largest grossing play in New Reps 22 year history. So, clearly I realized that there was a phenomenon at work here.

BB: So what do you think had something to do with that? Do you think it's the inherent, like kind of, people always say word of mouth carries a play, but in this I imagine a lot of people who see the shows are in situations where literally that word of mouth can have a lot of meaning because they might actually be going to the meetings with 30 people the next night.

SB: I think the remarkable thing is that it is a play with two audiences. It is a play with a word of mouth audience through the 12 step and other recovery and treatment communities that spreads like wild fire all over the country not jut in Boston, and then it's a play, and they start to bring their families and friends, and regular theatre audiences come, and they say "hey this is just a great story. It's a great play." You don't have to be in AA to appreciate it and that's the thing that we were so excited about and it just had a three week run in Boston, but by the end of the three weeks the theatre was packed every night and it was a phenomenon not just a play.

 

RL: I'd say over the month or so of the run in Boston there were some folks who came to see the play three or four times and just this week a woman came up to me after, in the first week of our previews here, after came up to me and said "you know I saw the play twice last year in Boston" and she was already here to see it again in our first week of previews. You're right is certainty does function for our audience, for folks that are in the AA fellowship tell us that it functions for them sometimes as a replacement for going to one of their meetings. That it feels to them like it's a meeting. That it's a live event that the characters of Bill and Bob are talking directly to the audience at certain points. They tell their story to each other and to us, which is the essential dynamic at an AA meeting is telling a story to each other, so the play works on a lot of different levels, but like Steve said, for me primarily as a theatre artist, my interest was to make sure we found a way to make this as good a play as it could be. Not just rely on the fact that there might be the built in audience for the play, but to really do justice to this as a piece of theatre, and as Steve said, really one of the great American success stories of the 20th century that I think a lot of folks outside of the AA community, me included didn't know- don't know about until we enter the world of the play and find there's this astonishing story of coincidences and life experiences and tragedies that brought these two guys together and through one 6 hour conversation they dropped a pebble in the pond that sent out ripples that today latterly are spreading all over the world, because you do have AA meetings happening in literally every country of the world as we speak.

BB: When you talk about making sure the play works on a dramatic level, anytime you do a biography I imagine there's a bit of a balance of how true exactly do we stay to the circumstances and how much do we fictionalize that, but try to stay to the honestly of what we're fictionalizing about. How many balances did you have to find in that with this show?

SB: That's a very good question. I've written a lot of plays and a lot of novels, and this was in some ways the toughest because it's a history and we felt that we wanted to accomplish both things, make it a good play but also an authentic history because it's an important subject to get right. The early drafts where much closer to the historical record we didn't really go further and what Rick really helped us do, I remember before the Boston production one of the big things that Janet, my wife the co-another and I realized, is that when you're writing this story you can never be in a position when you're writing any character that they know they're founding AA. They're just two drunks who are literally trying to stay alive one step at a time, and that I think is the shifts that we made in the drafts for the Boston production is that this has to be right where they are right at that time. The other thing though is that we did a lot of research. We went everywhere these guys had grown up, where they'd been. We spent a lot of time in Akron, we got to know anybody who knew them that we could find and so we started with a very strong foundation and as we widdled it down as we've gone more in the artistic dramatic dimension of it, it always stays sound in terms of what we're talking about and that's a real, I mean we couldn't do that without that measure of authenticity.

 

BB: What were some of the biggest, maybe, changes you felt had to be made Rick as you worked with the show?

RL: Well, we've changed it so much over the last three years and continue to change it almost daily. Although I think we're done. One thing is that we wanted to make sure that we always stayed ahead of the audience. That in the telling of the story we weren't revealing our hand too much so that the audience was able to make their own discoveries and this was one of the things that I think we've worked the most on together, because in the official authorized histories of these guys, which are very well told. There are a lot of books about them both authorized and unauthorized. They're almost all from years after the fact and all ultimately people remembering. And you know how we remember how when something ultimately leads to success, and then we remember the days when we were putting it together our memory of it does shift a little bit. I think one of the things was to make sure, as Steve said that in every line and every moment of the play that we weren't having the characters or the audience be able to anticipate what the next step was. To find the greatest level of uncertainly at every moment which would increase what's at stake on the stage and that's what audiences like to see. They like to see danger and people in danger and then see them grapple their way out of it if its redemptive comedy or they never do if it's tragedy.

BB: It seems to be working. The advanced sales for an off-Broadway play are just through the roof as well in New York. So I definitely wish you guys the best of success with the continued run of the show. It just opened and I thank you very much for coming in with your busy schedules at this time to talk about the show.

Both: Thanks.

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You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 105. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.

 or MP3 Feed with XML