Andre Royo in Drinking in America: Heads of a Bygone Era

A glass of wine with dinner, or a joint if you are so inclined, might be a good idea before meeting the array of characters who so imbibe in Eric Bogosian’s award-winning one-man tour-de-force, Drinking in America, a production of Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Performed to wiry perfection by Andre Royo, the assorted men he plays hale from the 1980’s. You might want to consider this background, drinking in American culture, to understanding the male toxicity—and fragility-- of our moment, decades later. And let’s face it, the drugs are different now.

Which may explain why the jokes landed askew at the performance we attended, even though Royo could not have been more appealing—as a talent agent, for example, doing lines of coke to wake up, trying to book Lee Marvin, but Richard Chamberlain would do. Or vice versa. It would be good to know the young folk in the audience could get these references.

Or the traveling salesman, on the road hawking industrial ceramic tile, wasted in a hotel room with an unseen “Cheryl.” The vignette starts with his paternal, fatigued request: “Cheryl, keep your rubbing to yourself,” as he passes out in an easy chair. The ending is less than happy; getting his money’s worth, he advises her, “There’s no future in the escort business.”

Balancing the substance use, the voices include a straight-ahead clergyman, lecturing all on how to free America of sin. Righteousness being its own form of addiction, he fits into this display of America, with his tips on how to make it great again, although, as he is in the ‘80’s, he does not use that language.

This could not be an easy gig for Andre Royo, excellent under Mark Armstrong’s direction. The ‘80’s era was not so long ago that its images have calcified and would resonate with anyone under 40. Royo deserved a standing ovation. At show’s end, we all understood we had seen a state-of-the-art rendition of a recent past from which we were still trying to recover.