Drinking & Writing

'DRINKING & WRITING' RECOMMENDED

WHEN: Through Jan. 18 (7 p.m. Saturdays, with no performance Dec.28)

WHERE: The Neo-Futurists at T's Bar and Restaurant, 5025 N. Clark

TICKETS: $8-$12

CALL: (773) 275-5255

'Writing is easy," said Gene Fowler, a journalist, editor and palof that yeasty Broadway chronicler, Damon Runyon. "All you do isstare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form at yourforehead."

This wonderful summation of the writer's plight (and you caneasily substitute "blank computer screen" for "blank page") came tomind as I watched "Drinking & Writing," the amusing little meditationby the Neo-Futurists, now being performed in the friendly, site-specific confines of a bar and restaurant in the Andersonvilleneighborhood.

"Five out of seven of America's Nobel Prize winners in literaturerecommend it," quips one of the trio of actor-writers--Sean Benjamin,Steven Mosqueda and Diana Slickman--who created the often amusing,periodically interactive piece that they also perform. Then theyproceed to name the members of this rather formidable group,including Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, SinclairLewis and Ernest Hemingway.

In fact, by the end of the evening, you may have constructed astunningly long list of many of the other major American writers ofthe 20th century (the parameters the ensemble gave itself, despitebookend quotes from that wonderfully dissipated French poet CharlesBaudelaire) who similarly combined alcohol and "word processing." Andeach of them--from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Jack Kerouac,Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver to Carson McCullers, DorothyParker and Dawn Powell (yes, the ladies who lunched also downed theirScotch)--are liberally quoted on the subject during this quirky,personal and alternately sad and entertaining theatrical essay.

The question that remains--and it is raised repeatedly--is whetherthe drinking fuels the writing, or the writing simply drives thewriters to drink. Or is there some unidentified emotional orbiological factor that leads a person to write, and that also mightlead him or her to the bottle?

Many of the writers quoted are honest enough to admit that they dosome of their worst work while under the influence, although some oftheir best writing may emerge out of the remorse that follows abinge. Of course, plenty of people who never raise a pen to paperhave a problem with alcohol, too; just listen to Raymond Carvertalking about how his blue-collar family, mostly electricians bytrade, are serious drinkers.

Alternating between these passages from the great writers are bitsof lore and social science--from a comic (and highly probable)description of how mankind first hit upon the process of fermentationand observed the effects of drinking such liquid, to a step-by-stepguide to the five stages of inebriation, including euphoria,excitation, confusion, stupor and coma, plus the worst-case sixthstep, death.

McCullers said she wouldn't want to live if she couldn't write.Kerouac said that because he was a Catholic he couldn't commitsuicide, but there was nothing to prevent him from drinking himselfto death. Bukowski, waxing poetic on the hangover, observed thatdrunks are never forgiven, but they forgive themselves in order todrink again.

The truth is, very few people, whether they are writers or not,become more literate, more charming or more entertaining when theyare drunk; in general, they only grow more obnoxious, pathetic, self-pitying, abusive or boring.

Use "wine, poetry or virtue," anything to free the imagination,Baudelaire once said. Last orders.