Rum Punch: The Qualification of Douglas Evans is a Boozy Doozy

The Qualification of Douglas Evans, a deeply compelling new play for the Amoralists by Derek Ahonen, looks at addiction without embellishment. It skips the pathos we’re used to seeing in drinking stories and instead takes a steady march through a life leaning more and more on the bottle. Ahonen’s tightly knit, episodic drama treats alcoholism as the complicated affliction it is. Family history haunts Douglas (played by Ahonen), a struggling young actor-playwright, but so do emotional misfortunes, physical depravity, and moral crises. His severe father (Penny Bittone) climbs on and off the wagon throughout his childhood; his mother (Barbara Weetman) is terrified but tenacious. When he moves to New York to pursue a life in the theater, the fear and self-doubt Douglas learned at home plays out in unstable, codependent relationships with women; understanding others comes slowly and painfully to him. At first he just needs to down a couple of cocktails to steel his nerves for a seduction. Then playwriting failures and successes provide more highs and lows for him to lubricate with liquor. He tends bar as a day job: “I drink all day on one side of the bar and drink all night on the other,” he tells a date. Eventually bottles attach to his hand, until he inevitably hits bottom and the pain of withdrawal makes it almost unimaginable for him to stop.