Blackout (2021)

“When I got sober, I asked myself, Who are you? What makes you tick? How do you feel about that? It’s hard to be honest with yourself sometimes. But you know what? I loved asking those questions, and finding out all the answers. And I’m still asking. And I’ll ask until the day I die.” Jack, Blackout

In Fall 2021, Dr. Danielle Bacibianco directed Gary Lennon’s off-Broadway play Blackout at Sea View Playwrights Theatre, in Staten Island, New York. The production ran from November-December 2021.

Lennon’s play, Blackout, places the setting of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Christmas Eve during the 1990s. The audience is introduced to a diverse group of folks who have gathered as a recovery community to share their “experience, strength, and hope” in 12-Step Tradition at the meeting. Through each character’s monologue, the audience witnesses the strength and integrity it takes in achieving sobriety, but how each details the struggle to stay sober and make sense of their sober lives during the holidays. Each character works through desperation, loneliness, regret, and shame as they share their stories together, as a family of love and healing.

The play was later adapted into a film, Drunks, with Lennon as the screenwriter, with big names like Richard Lewis, Dianne West, Faye Dunaway, Howard Rollins, Jr., and Spalding Gray starring in the cast of the movie version.