How ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Became Their Passion Project

“I’m very happy to have had a way to process that through writing this piece,” he added. He was mindful that it not turn preachy — it’s not “a cautionary tale, a morality play, nothing like that,” he said. “They’re all heroes, even though this is a tragedy.”

For the actors, one of biggest hurdles was also, in this production, the most basic: acting drunk. It’s one of the hardest things for a performer to do, the cast and creative team said. (People who are inebriated, after all, are mostly trying to appear sober.) There’s a fear, James said, that the audience won’t believe it because they “see the mechanics of a person trying to act like they’re drunk.”

Overcoming that started with physical craft, imagining “that your body is not in control,” he said. “There is great joy, in trying to kind of unleash oneself — it’s dangerous, and it’s not contained. So as an actor, that’s a lot of fun to do.”

“Fun” is not a word normally associated with “Days of Wine and Roses,” which so bleakly shows the splintering of a family. But O’Hara, too, had to find moments of positivity in even in the steepest spiral. “We go on because there are moments of hope,” she said. “There are moments of completion and success, in life and in motherhood and marriage, and in this story that we tell.

“I come off the stage feeling emotional, but elated and proud and breathless — literally breathless — from the freedom to be given a challenge like this and to be trusted with it,” O’Hara added.

It didn’t start out as a passion project. But now, between the years in development, the exhilaration of the performance and the audience connection, “I’ve never been so passionate about anything in my life,” she said.