Review: ‘When Harry Met Rehab’ tells the funny, gutsy recovery story of ESPN sports personality Harry Teinowitz
In March 2011, the record shows, radio personality Harry Teinowitz was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated in Skokie. He apologized to his listeners but his employer still suspended him from his aptly (or inaptly) named show, “The Afternoon Saloon,” on the ESPN 1000 radio station.
That incident led to Teinowitz going into rehab and, over the weekend, his new play about that experience opened in Chicago at the Greenhouse Theater Center in a production starring Dan Butler and Melissa Gilbert. It begins with a description of all of the perils of free-flowing booze for anyone around sports media.
“There were Blackhawk games,” the Harry character says, “when I had more shots than they did.”
For Teinowitz, of course, the music stopped with the flashing lights on Greenwood Street. He never did get his show back. But he has penned a dark yet strikingly comedic ode to the merits of rehab, a courageous little play that certainly does not range into profound artistic territory but nonetheless recounts its truths, find room for laughs and moves its audience.
Anyone who has been through rehab will tell you that alcoholism and other addictions impact people in all walks of life. And the central premise of “When Harry Met Rehab” is that the rehab community that develops across the usual divides in American society is what makes recovery possible.
The show’s biggest asset is Butler, familiar to audiences from his work on “Frasier,” and a sufficiently gruff performer to cut through some of the sentimentality in the script. Teinowitz, working with the writer Spike Manton (”Leaving Iowa”), is telling a story of a journey to self-knowledge and Butler is fully credible as a reluctant convert to rehab-speak. Add in Butler’s experience delivering exquisitely timed one-liners and you’ve got a winning performance. At the end, he takes some risks in a monologue that really pays off, ending the play with enough emotional oomph for the audience to fall silent.
That said, all of the union actors in director Jackson Gay’s modestly scaled production are strong. Alongside the honest Chicago actors Chiké Johnson, Keith D. Gallagher, Jonathan Moises Olivares and the especially excellent Elizabeth Laidlaw (who all play folks belonging to Harry’s group) is Melissa Gilbert, the former child actor who played Laura Ingalls Wilder on the beloved NBC series “Little House on the Prairie” and who here plays the therapist. She feels very invested in this project, too, and you can feel the scale of her emotional commitment.
Production values are very strong; the setting by Regina Garcia does as much with the old Victory Gardens space as I’ve seen a designer do.
The piece will, of course, be of the most interest to those compelled by this topic, always timely but never more so as we approach the holidays coming at the end of a stressed-out year.
I think Minton could deepen some of his overly short scenes; the writing has a way of cutting itself off just as these actors are beginning to fire up what they can do.
But it’s already an engaging Chicago story. The macho persona of the Chicago sports guy does not, of course, easily admit error nor vulnerability. It took some guts for Teinowitz to tell his story without any excuses.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “When Harry Met Rehab”
When: Through Jan. 30
Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $42-$85 at 773-404-7336 and www.whenharrymetrehab.com
COVID protocol: Audience members must have proof of vaccination; masks required in the theater.