Dark comedy play about addiction begins free, statewide tour

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use disorder, call Delaware’s Substance Abuse Hotline (Northern Delaware: 800-652-2929 / Southern Delaware: 800-345-6785). Local nonprofit aTAcK Addiction is an additional resource for support groups, food and housing assistance and more. Its resource center is located at 210 Peoples Plaza, Newark, DE 19702. 

For a play about substance use disorder, “The White Chip” is anything but sobering for the majority of its runtime. 

The sardonically comedic script follows its central character, Steven, as he recounts his experiences with alcoholism. It flies through decades of absurd experiences, from participating in theater at a Latter-day Saint summer camp to sneaking onto a golf course to spread his father’s ashes.

Even the script’s production notes encourage silliness.

“It’s a play about life in the theater, so don’t shy away from theatricality,” advises the playwright, Sean Daniels. He wrote the script over a decade ago, drawing from his experiences as theater maker struggling with alcoholism.

Delaware’s New Light Theatre took Daniels’ advice to heart during its first production of “The White Chip” at OperaDelaware Studios in March. The production returns Nov. 7-15 with four free performances across the state.

“We threw the kitchen sink at this thing in terms of theatrical conventions,” said co-director Charlie DelMarcelle. “There’s puppets. There’s shadow work. There’s music. There’s weird costume stuff. There’s some interesting and goofy staging. There’s a really active sound design that gets cartoonish at some points.”

For example, during a scene at a college toga party, the cast used their hands as puppets to mime characters guzzling their drinks and vomiting them back up. 

“The early days of addiction are sometimes marked by absurdity and things that feel funny and ridiculous. That’s part of why (Steven) doesn’t take it seriously,” said lead actor Owen Corey. “If we give it an art form that doesn’t take itself seriously, like hand puppets chugging little, baby Solo Cups, it’s truthful to what the script is asking of us.”

“The White Chip” is typically performed by three actors — one as Steven and the other two playing his friends, family members, co-workers and more. 

But DelMarcelle chose to add a fourth actor, Trice Baldwin-Browns, to embody both Steven’s mother and father. Until the climax of the play, Baldwin-Browns sits at a table, physically distanced from the other actors to symbolize Steven’s emotional distance from his parents as he struggles on his own. 

“The White Chip” is not the first instance of DelMarcelle getting experimental onstage to explore the subject of substance use disorder.

His one-man show, “A Shadow That Broke the Light,” was inspired by his younger brother Joey’s death by heroin overdose in 2014. Afterwards, DelMarcelle and his brother, Adam, began interviewing others who had lost loved ones to overdose.

“A Shadow That Broke the Light” took the form of a monologue that was repeatedly interrupted by a timer, which symbolized the frequency of daily overdose deaths in the United States. 

When the timer ran out, DelMarcelle would pause his monologue to hang a sheet of paper on a clothesline surrounding the set. Adam made the paper from the donated clothing of people who had died by overdose.

The play’s 2023 Philadelphia run made an impression on Lena Mucchetti, New Light Theatre’s artistic director. When she began searching for directors for “The White Chip,” DelMarcelle instantly came to mind.

‘Laughter in the recovery rooms’

New Light Theatre has made a tradition of partnering with nonprofit organizations to raise funds and bring awareness to social issues, but the theater company hadn’t explored substance use disorder until Mucchetti read “The White Chip.”

“The playwright often talks about how, when you see someone in addiction or recovery in a show, it’s, like, a dark church basement, and everyone’s very serious,” she said. “You don’t get to see the full spectrum of humanity, of the joy in the recovery community, the laughter in the recovery rooms.”

For both runs of “The White Chip,” New Light Theatre has partnered with atTAcK Addiction, the Delaware nonprofit founded by the Keister family after their son’s accidental overdose. 

atTAcK Addiction raises awareness about substance use disorder and provides housing programs, support groups, Narcan training and more. The nonprofit also operates a resource center and food pantry in Newark.

During the initial run, New Light Theatre hosted talkbacks moderated by representatives from atTAcK Addiction. A Dover therapist’s comment that the show “could be life saving” for her clients inspired the show’s second, statewide run.

It’ll be New Light Theatre’s first community tour. But it helps that “The White Chip” doesn’t have an elaborate set. All that needs to be transported is four actors and some props.

Thanks to the tour’s sponsors, the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services and Highmark Health Options, New Light Theatre is able to offer all four performances for free.

“That was the point of this tour, to make it super accessible to folks, to think of it as a sort of preventative healthcare measure and not just entertainment,” Mucchetti said. 

‘Neuroscience to a bad habit’

DelMarcelle said several of the people he interviewed for “A Shadow That Broke the Light” never ran obituaries for loved ones they lost to overdose out of a sense of shame.

By bringing “The White Chip” to a broader audience, the cast and crew at New Light Theatre are hopeful that they can reduce the stigma around substance use disorder. 

The play shows that anybody can struggle with addiction, and some, like Steven, hide their problem incredibly well. As DelMarcelle put it, there’s no one way a person with substance use disorder looks or acts like.

In Steven’s case, he’s a highly successful theater maker who becomes dependent on alcohol to socialize and tap into his creativity.

DelMarcelle is familiar with Steven’s struggles. He, too, used to self-medicate with alcohol. He believed if he went to therapy or took medication for his anxiety, the “engine” that drives his creative output would be compromised.

“There’s something essentially incredibly scary and vulnerable about making art, presenting yourself publicly to other people,” DelMarcelle said. “A lot of theater people … are actually incredibly introverted, very private, and alcohol and drugs can take some of that edge off.”

He added that the assumption that “somehow, people have full control over their addiction” and could “just stop” if they truly wanted to is particularly harmful because it ignores factors like physiological predispositions to addiction and the chemical dependence that can develop with regular drug and alcohol use.

Both the character, Steven, and the playwright, Daniels, overcame their alcoholism by tackling addiction as a scientific problem rather than a moral or religious one. 

“There’s a neuroscience to a bad habit,” Corey said, adding that most people are “dopamine addicts” who can learn from the play, whether they have substance use disorder or not. 

DelMarcelle’s advice to anyone struggling with addiction is to be “strong enough and vulnerable enough” to ask for help, then self-compassionate when stumbling on the road to recovery, 

 It’s a road that, as “The White Chip” emphasizes, can be full of humor and heart.

“Addiction really thrives in isolation, and one of the antidotes to that is building community. (We need to be) checking on our people, being there for people, understanding that, for folks who are struggling with addiction, it is like any other disease. It is a chemical, biological thing happening in their body,” Mucchetti said. “I also hope that (the play) highlights for folks how many different resources there are out there, and that there is a lot of hope in recovery. A lot of hope and a lot of joy are possible on the other side of it.”

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