Spit&vigor’s Anonymous is the sort of Alcoholics Anonymous art that Playwrights Horizons’ The Dinosaurs challenges.

The vast majority of stories about AA  either chart a character’s progression through addiction rehab over a multitude of montaged sessions…or they hone in — Anonymous style — on one particularly !!!DRAMATIC!!!! meeting, during which seemingly all of the attendees come to moments of permanent revelation. 

But The Dinosaurs presents what feels like a more realistic — and surrealistic — version of AA. Ordinary women tell their ordinary stories without finishing them, because a timer cuts them off before they reach their potentially-notable conclusions. These abrupt outs undercut the importance of the actual content of the tales, shifting their resonance to the act of storytelling itself.

A conventional play would’ve crafted these mini narratives with clear beginnings, middles, and resolutions, for the audience to be able to decipher their meaningful trajectory. But The Dinosaur’s AA understands that leaving a story incomplete fuels an imperative for the orator to return the following week, as opposed to skipping out to imbibe.

Yet week after week, the stories are but one piece in the AA puzzle. Another major piece are their minute gestures of communal care, the micro tasks they perform for each other to set up and put away what’s needed each week — the lifeblood of recovering addicts who need something productive to do, for fear that staying idle increases the lure of booze. 

Time is their nightmare; how to fill it with anything besides drugs. Les Waters’ production is steeped in this crawling time; a group of people gathering to help each other through telling and listening to stories places them in humanity’s oldest lineage (sound like theater?), a multitudinous tradition that has the power to transcend the temporal continuum within a specific space. 

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As a title, The Dinosaurs indicates that there may be more under the deceptively-simple surface of Jacob Perkins’s play, because why the fuck is it named after dinos??