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Drinking & Writing Volume IV: The 12 Steps of Christmas
Read our TimeOut review online.
Read the Chicago Reader review below.
Highly Recommended
  DRINKING & WRITING VOLUME IV: THE 12 STEPS OF CHRISTMAS Steve Mosqueda and Sean Benjamin's celebration of literature and inebriation defies categorization. They don't really play characters. And it's not a staged reading, though they do deliver selections from the works of great alcoholic writers. It's kind of performance but without the arty baggage or the art crowd. It's almost a party but a very structured one, where the hosts dominate an evening that's relaxed, entertaining, and unpretentious. Mosqueda and Benjamin give out gifts, read aloud, and tell some funny/horrifying stories from their own pasts about drinking at the holidays. Terrific hosts, they keep things light and seem to genuinely enjoy themselves. And they don't flinch when audience members walk by to get a refill. --Jack Helbig Through 12/21: Fri 10:30 PM, Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, lobby bar, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, $15.
Victory Gardens Biograph Theater and The Drinking & Writing Brewery present the world premiere of Drinking & Writing Volume IV: The 12 Steps of Christmas. The true Christmas Spirit comes out when it's drunk. Sean and Steve explore the addictive, destructive holiday called Christmas.
Where did all of this start? With the play Drinking & Writing. A show written and performed by Steve Mosqueda, Sean Benjamin, and Diana Slickman. It explored the connection between creativity and alcohol. We sat at the bar and drank and talked about famous drinkers and writers, our drinking and writing, the effects of alcohol on the body and mind and family, and we drank...more. We performed it originally at T's Bar-Restaurant in Chicago and since then wrote another volume, Drinking & Writing Volume II: The Noble Experiment. Once again, Sean and Steve with the addition of Chloe Johnston, performed the show in bars everywhere. Volume II focused on Prohibition Era writers, and there were a lot of them (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, Millay...). And then came Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover. We offer to the world our in depth research we conducted (on ourselves) in our attempt to cure the hangover and we offer up some writing on hangovers by some of the greatest hungover writers including John Cheever and Charles Bukowski. Read our review and Critic's Choice from the Chicago Reader below.
We've performed our shows in bars throughout Chicago; at Dad's Garage Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia; Beaver Creek, Colorado; Des Moines, Iowa; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Fringe Festival.
And we'll keep doing the show as log as there are bars to sit at.
Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover
Read the Chicago Reader review for Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
DRINKING & WRITING VOLUME III: TO CURE A HANGOVER Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda explore possible morning-after cures in this goofy, unflinching lecture-cum-performance about the unpleasant consequences of the bibulous life. Self-loathing prose from  John Cheever and Charles Bukowski--two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum--is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers' experiments in thwarting a hungover "poor sense of well-being" (quite unlike the "false sense of well-being" that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks. Benjamin and Mosqueda neither glorify nor repudiate the hard-drinking life--after all, shit-faced happens. --Kerry Reid
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