Denis Johnson's Drinking Games

You always learn something new when you watch somebody drink. Not that vino leads to veritas in any literal way—but, over the span of a long, soggy night, small, revealing details, often more gestural than verbal, accumulate. How your fellow-partygoer holds a glass, or how often she takes a drink, or what counts, in her world, as a cocktail: all of this helps you to know her better, to figure out where she’s really coming from. Two recent productions—“Des Moines,” the final play by the late Denis Johnson, from 2007, and a revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy,” from 2014, in its Broadway première—feature alcohol as a spur and a guiding presence, a conduit to otherwise fugitive knowledge.