Play pokes fun at habits

by Eva Dameron

Daily Lobo

Bad habits are something to laugh about.

And so is the Tony Award-winning play "Bad Habits," a two-part comedy penned by playwright Terrence McNally in 1974.

"It's about addictions and habits," director Marty Epstein said. "It's about two approaches to treating them but done in a very comic sense."

The first part, Dunelawn, features a wheelchair-bound therapist named Dr. Pepper, played by John Hardman, who runs a retreat for couples having relationship problems. He is in a wheelchair because his wife pushed him down a flight of stairs.

Hardman said Dr. Pepper is an eccentric guy with a porous plate in his head who just hangs around and drinks a lot.

He also does a little bit of therapy on the side.

"Unhappy married couples come there for marriage counseling in a very unorthodox setting where basically they do whatever they want to," Epstein said. "It's a kind of free-for-all."

The main tension occurs between Mr. and Mrs. Scupp. Mr. Scupp has been living at Dunelawn for three months and his wife comes to visit him. They have been trying to kill each other for years and Mr. Scupp finally ended up at Dunelawn when he ran over his wife's toes with a remote-controlled lawn mower. The rigid and tense Mrs. Scupp comes expecting to see progress, but instead finds her husband has spent all his time drinking, smoking, eating high-cholesterol foods and dancing with young girls.

"This is a huge surprise to her," said Robin Epstein, who plays Mrs. Scupp. "There's an unfolding of 'Oh, my goodness. This is what happens here? This is the kind of people who are here?'"

The second part, Ravenswood, deals with alcoholism, obsessions with violence and cross-dressing. The solution used is serum, administered to patients strapped to wheelchairs by Dr. Toynbee, a man who mumbles incoherently and is viewed as a saint by his nursing staff.

Here, Hardman plays Mr. Yamadoro, an Italian patient who thinks he is Japanese and is fixated with pain and violence.

"He likes to watch other people's fingernails get pulled," Hardman said. "At Ravenswood, all they do to keep him under control is inject him - keeps him in a state of screwed-up euphoria."

Hardman said based on the year the play was written, it's making fun of the fact that free love in the '60s never worked and it was mostly sex and dope all the time.

"When it was over, it was like 'Oh, we have to go to work now,'" he said.

"These are self-perpetuating situations," Hardman said. "How do you keep making money? You keep people in treatment forever. They never leave."

Epstein said the big picture of addictions and how we treat patients has not changed much since 1974 - these things will be with us a hundred years from now.

"McNally applies humor to dark situations," Epstein said. "It's almost like you laugh at yourself. You can look at this guy who is wrapped up screaming 'I want a drink, give me a drink, give me a drink' and you laugh at it because you've been through it or maybe you're still going through it."