There’s a disconcerting sitcommy chipperness to Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, an autobiographical portrait of the veteran theatermaker’s descent into alcoholism and journey toward recovery. (The show opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space.) Joe Tapper plays the Daniels stand-in, Steven, with the energy of a golden retriever who’s all too eager to please — taking his first sips of beer at age 12, partying hard at Florida State, and then using his booze-boosted confidence to charm employers, artists and donors as an aspiring stage director and regional theater executive.

We know where this is all going, of course, long before the blackouts, the car crashes, the missed work days, the barely concealed day drinking make it obvious even to Steven himself. Stories of addiction and recovery have become a kind of genre that have a built-in structure — and Daniels’s has a familiarity that’s hard to mask despite the theater-world specifics. His writing is punchy to the point of hamminess, achieving a quick-cut sketch-comedy vibe that’s amplified by the overly broad performances under Sheryl Kaller’s direction. The hard-working Crystal Dickinson and Jason Tam are saddled with a wide variety of roles and an equally wide variety of accents and affects — to ever-more diminishing returns.

While the pacing seldom flags during the 1-hour-45-minute show, you may find yourself wishing that Steven would hit bottom sooner, if only to cut short the long slog through his miserably selfish behavior. Daniels saves his most surprising departure from the recovery genre archetype for the final minutes. As an ex-Mormon who’s uncomfortable embracing Jesus or organized religion in the traditional AA sense, Steven struggles to identify an authority larger than himself to which he can fully submit. But that changes when he encounters a Jewish AA group (cue the exaggerated New York Jewish accents for Dickinson and Tam) that preaches the virtues of Science — how, for instance, dopamine levels drop off when addicts stop drinking and only recover to normal “sky is blue” levels after about 90 days of sobriety.

Finally, he understands his repeated past cycles of relapses (and growing collection of “white chips” for achieving 24 hours of sobriety) and sees an evidence-based pathway toward recovery that makes sense to him. It’s a compelling revelation in a play that’s both admirable and tonally jarring.