Not for these reveling lovers the swelling strings of Henry Mancini, who scored the movie; within the cocktail-mixing tune “Evanesce,” Guettel provides them shiny, quick music, frenetic and danceable — and once they do a little bit of soft-shoe in salt spilled on the ground, there’s a playful heedlessness to their sandpaper percussion. (Choreography is by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia.) This is the excessive that makes sobriety so unthinkable for Kirsten and Joe, whilst their lives disintegrate.

Which they do, alarmingly, regardless of their love for one another and for his or her hyper-capable daughter, Lila (Ella Dane Morgan), who learns very younger to take care of herself, and to misinform cowl for her mother and father. It’s Joe who finds the power, ultimately, to decide on their youngster over alcohol, and Kirsten who feels deserted by her husband, as she clings to what was their personal world.

Affecting as O’Hara is, Kirsten is much less totally drawn than Joe, whose again story makes him a just lately returned veteran of the Korean War. (The fight flashback Joe suffers throughout one drunken binge feels gratuitous.)

Kirsten will get no such context, and consequently appears oddly up to date, which makes the present, for all its ’50s design prospers, really feel unrooted in time. (Sets are by Lizzie Clachan, costumes by Dede Ayite.) Kirsten is conscious of the sexism that pervades her period — she makes snappy reference to the minuscule variety of feminine senators — however the present doesn’t solely appear to be. (Warning: Spoilers forward.)

There isn’t any sense of the opprobrium that might greet a feminine alcoholic within the Nineteen Fifties, not to mention one who leaves her youngster, or the extreme judgment that might be handed on a married girl who sleeps with unusual males when she’s on a bender. Or how any of that might contribute to Kirsten’s personal self-loathing.

Still, this “Days of Wine and Roses” has wells of compassion for her thrall to alcohol.

“Don’t give up on me,” Kirsten writes to her daughter. She would possibly even imply it when she provides: “I’ll be home soon.”

Days of Wine and Roses
Through July 16 on the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.