The treacherous path to sobriety in American theatre

Artists often have a tricky relationship with alcohol.

Some say they must have it to unlock their inner creative. Others say it lets them go on stage and tap into the courage needed to be vulnerable.

And many people have rules about when, how, and how much they drink. For some, it lets them have a healthy relationship with alcohol, for others, it is part of an inner bargaining that leads to and maintains addiction.

Sean Daniels, the artistic director of the Arizona Theatre Company, is in long-term recovery after alcohol very nearly destroyed his career as a director and theatre-maker. He has written a play, “The White Chip,” which is an autobiographical piece telling his struggle with addiction and the journey he took to sobriety.

“The story is about me being someone who felt like they really thrived and alcohol helped my career, helped me to make connections,” Daniels said.

He described going to TCG conferences and scoring jobs at two in the morning at the bar.

“It’s a relationship business,” Daniels said. “We actually don’t see the majority of work others do, so it’s about making those connections. There were a thousand other ways to make connections, but I didn’t know them. I knew those at the bar at 1 a.m. That’s always the tricky part of any disease. Those friendships are real.”

He described a TCG conference where he was hosting a session. He brought in an open bar and attendance doubled.

“It’s joyful,” Daniels said. “It’s the thing that we struggle with any addiction. At one point, it is joyful and that ends up what you are chasing for some time afterward.”

Sean Daniels (Photo: Mamta Popat)

Doak Bloss, an actor who has performed in many mid-Michigan theaters and has been hosting a podcast during the pandemic which included a session where a panel discussed alcohol and the theater, (On YouTube: “House Left: It’s Booze with a Z, Not Boos with an S”) didn’t start drinking until he was 38 and it helped him survive a time of great loss.

Bloss describes vodka as his friend, a friend who helped him move past suicidal feelings and, he thought, perform better on stage when he had a vodka an hour before the performance. He says he still thinks of vodka as a friend, just not one he talks to anymore.

“That first 20 minutes into a vodka tonic, I would have thoughts and have connections that I hadn’t had before,” Bloss said. “You can have access to those things without it, I know that now, but that’s kind of how it was. It became a way to come out in a way that felt really good and felt like I had control over it as well.”

He said having a drink at 5:30 p.m. became part of his process to loosen up and find aspects of characters he didn’t think he could find otherwise.

“An hour and a half before a rehearsal, I would have a vodka tonic,” Bloss said. “By rehearsal time, there were no effects anyone could see, but I felt free.”

Bloss is also working on a play titled “Vodka” about the vodka dreams he had after becoming sober.

For Daniels, the bottom dropped out while he was with The Actors Theatre of Louisville. His father died of Parkinson’s and he sought alcohol as a crutch to help him grieve, and, he said, it turned on him.

“It’s completely baked into the artist mindset that a level of self-destruction is necessary to unlock what you want to do,” Daniels said. “In some ways, you start to believe that without it, you are not an artist. That it helps you to unlock your genius.”

He said once he got sober, it was embarrassing to look back and realize that he was not, in fact, being a top-level artist and the alcohol was 100 percent affecting what he did.

He was fired from his job, in part he says, because they didn’t know how to handle it. A lot of their donors were health care and alcohol companies and it was tricky to have an employee struggling with alcoholism.

“I got a lot of talking-tos about pulling it together,” Daniels said. “I would say ‘I will.’ I believed me and they believed me, and then I couldn’t do it.”

He observes that 10 percent of the country struggles with alcoholism and that we know it is a disease. We wouldn’t, he pointed out, make someone with cancer promise to stop having cancer and then view it as a moral failure when they relapsed.

“In the performing arts, where we claim that we are empathy generators, that we create stories to be more empathetic, we sometimes struggle to practice it in our own way,” Daniels said. “They didn’t know what to do and when I couldn’t pull it together, they fired me.”

Daniels adds that shame plays a huge role in addiction. He didn’t say anything at the time because he felt that no one would want to work with him. He thought that everyone in American theatre could drink except for him. Then when he got sober, people came up to him and shared their stories about being sober.

“Where the fuck were you when I was struggling and feeling like I was the only person?” he said, explaining that that is now why he is very public about his recovery.

Bloss finds it similarly important to talk about sobriety. Both artists struggled with Alcoholics Anonymous, mostly because of its emphasis on a religious higher power. For Bloss, he also dislikes the aspect of anonymity, something he feels is another form of being closeted.

“I have said to my therapist—who is an alcoholic herself—and other people from AA that I just don’t like the second A. I don’t like anonymous,” Bloss said. “I don’t think that supports the whole stigma we put on drinking that it is a moral flaw. It feels like it would be a better world if people could be (honest) all the time.”

“House Left: It’s Booze with a Z, Not Boos with an S”

Daniels says he understand the anonymity and it was something that helped him in the beginning. In fact, he was often terrified that someone there would recognize him.

“If I had any other disease, people would run marathons for me,” Daniels said. “They would do baking and fundraisers. I have so many friends who are cancer survivors and that is part of their story whenever they talk. We don’t have that in the recovery community. It still feels like a moral failing, which actually, we know in 2021, that it is just like any other disease.”

In addition to the myth of alcohol feeding creativity, Daniels describes an alcohol culture in theatre because theatres rely on donors to survive. He says booze is a great way to get donors to give more.

“Almost every donor event is pretty wet,” Daniels said. “You get your donors soused up and get them emotional. You would never go to a fundraiser that didn’t have an open bar. You want your donors to be in a great mood by the time the live auction starts.”

Daniels said there has been a shift with the growth of social media as artists begin to talk about their stories and there is greater knowledge about who the sober theatre-makers are. We are starting to see artists who have had tremendous success in their sober years. He gave Anthony Hopkins as an example who recently came out as being sober for decades.

“We’re starting to destroy that myth that you have to burn bright and die young to be an artist,” Daniels said.

What can the theatre world do to support those who are in recovery? One thing, Daniels said, would be to provide a mechanism to let a company know that an incoming artist struggles with addiction.

“If you are allergic to peanuts or you are a vegan, you will get a form to fill out before you arrive as a guest artist, but we don’t think about addiction on the same level as a peanut allergy,” Daniels said. “We’ve been so good about reaching out to artists in advance to make their life easier, to not serve them food at opening night they can’t eat, but we haven’t made the leap to something that is life or death for ten percent of the population.”

Unlike many addictions, alcohol is omnipresent in our society, a legal substance for which there is advertising everywhere you turn. The recovery industry is unregulated so there is no guarantee that when someone goes into rehab, they’re getting a good program.

“There is not a lot of things in place to help people,” Daniels said. “You add in shame, industries that are big, and no way to get help and you understand why last year was the worse year for overdoses since they started keeping records.”

Daniels wants people to know that there are a lot of successful theater artists who have destroyed their career and made it back. He invites people to reach out to him at sdaniels@arizonatheatre.org and he will offer what help he can. He says he can help someone find a gay sponsor, a female sponsor, or anything specific they might need.

“I would encourage them to reach out,” Daniels said. “I want to be the thing that I couldn’t find. Where do you go? Has anyone in the theatre ever gotten sober? The answer is yes, tons of people, but that narrative isn’t very loud.”

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Bridgette Redman is an arts journalist who has been covering and reviewing theatre since the late 1990s. A fellow for the 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Journalism Institute for Theater and Musical Theater at USC Annenberg, Bridgette also has a performing arts column that runs biweekly for the Lansing State Journal. She now writes about the arts for numerous publications around the country including Encore Monthly, Entertainer!, the Santa Monica Argonaut, Los Angeles Downtown News, Encore Michigan, and more.