Lines They
Know by Heart
Addicts in recovery get roles
of their lives in 'Visions'

By AMANDA GARDNER
Daily News Feature Writer

Ray has spent most of his life preparing for his stage role — but he probably wishes he hadn't.

On stage, Ray plays a tramp. In real life, Ray is a 43-year-old recovering alcoholic waiting to get a liver transplant. He spent 32 years of his life drunk, and he knows what it feels like to have people back away from you because you smell. (Like most of his fellow cast members, he uses only his first name to protect his identity.)

Acting Out: Members of the 'Visions' cast rehearse a domestic fight scene at Eva's Village, a comprehensive rehab and treatment center in Paterson, N.J.

Albert, too, is a natural for his part: He plays a convict looking for easy prey. "I've been back and forth to jail five or six times," says the 37-year-old recovering cocaine addict. "I seen how they go down."

Donald plays a husband who steals from his wife's purse. "It gives me flashbacks," he says with a shudder. "I've been in a couple of purses. Mother's, sister's — whoever's purse was laying around to go in."

The actors in "Visions," a play about addiction and recovery, don't play their roles. They are their roles. And the scenes could have come from any one of their lives, which is what makes the drama so gripping.

The play is the brainchild of Bob, a recovering alcoholic, who wrote the scenes during breaks on the job at an automotive plant in New Jersey. When various community theaters turned down the script, he recruited a group of friends he had met in recovery and put it on at Integrity House, a longterm rehab center in Secaucus, N.J.

That was in September 1991. Since then, "Visions" has been seen by more than 12,000 people in some of the most unusual theaters in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania: rehab centers, hospitals, homeless shelters and prisons. Along the way, the production has been nominated for two "Points of Light" awards, and there have been other public tributes, as well.

For a while, Bob was content doing a couple of performances a year. But in December, he took the show to Eva's Village, a comprehensive rehab and treatment center in Paterson, N.J., which also has a soup kitchen and several homeless shelters. Robert was in the audience that night.

"It touched me in so many areas. It's so real," he says. "It shows you how it is. I saw myself getting high. I could relate to almost everything."

Bob says the reaction "was so tremendous. I felt such love in that shelter that I knew I had to continue doing as many productions as I could." He went to Eva's management and said he wanted to start a new production team there. They agreed, and soon after, he held tryouts. (Robert got the part of a paramedic).

Wednesday was rehearsal night at Eva's, where, ironically, you can see the lighted signs of a bar and a liquor store through the windows.

Inside the shelter's soup kitchen, the list of scenes has been written in magic marker on a large piece of old cardboard, and is tacked to a wall. The actors start going through the scenes in sequence. First, Ray weaves drunkenly across the stage, foraging for food in a garbage can. Then comes Donald's purse scene and Albert's jail scene. Several more follow: a hooker with her pimp, a man going through the d.t.'s, an abusive husband, a boy robbing a dead addict, a woman being told she has AIDS. One is particularly convincing: when Guy, who plays a sales manager, fires an employee. "It happened to me," he says later. "I cried."

Despite the true-life drama, the message is a hopeful one — both for the cast and for their audiences. "It's more of a sense of where they've been and things they've been through and where they are now," says Derrick Williams, program coordinator of Eva's men's shelter. "It's a pride in being clean now. It's a beautiful thing."

"It keeps my memory green about who I was — and I don't want to go back," says a recovering addict who spent 20 years, on and off, behind bars. His adult daughter is also a cast member.

"It makes me regret things I have done and it's incentive to stay clean," says Donald. And then there's the centuries-old lure of the theater. "It's exciting," adds Donald. "It's like a rush."

The good kind.