If any director whose work is displayed in St. Louis regularly can spin flax into gold, that director is Steven Woolf. To some extent, this is what he does with Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain. Here, however, I am left wondering what he saw in this play in the first place that made him want to try to work his magic on it.
Woolf publicizes his travels to New York, London, Chicago and various festivals where, presumably, he does some shopping to make recommendations for new plays. I assume he saw this one during its Chicago or Broadway runs. It won awards in Chicago and was reasonably, if not enthusiastically, received in New York, as I recall. Of course, it sold tickets due to the popularity of its cast, Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, yet would people have wanted to see it with good, unknown actors? Playwright Huff’s interview included in the Rep’s program indicates that even he finds it “a film/TV genre, the ‘buddy cop’ story.” But, he adds, as the son-in-law of a police officer, he is familiar with the seamier side of the law, the stories the mass media don’t tell, and his intention was to “thread through them the moral obverse of what we’re used to seeing.”
So, the question becomes does the author succeed? I don’t think so. Movies have been telling the story of the good(ish)/bad(ish) cop since the days of film noir. And scatological language and racial slurs have all shown up in the past couple of decades both on the big screen and premium cable, so movies like Tequila Sunrise, or most pertinently, Internal Affairs, have been over this ground, and to my mind, Huff adds very little that’s new.
However, I can see the “obverse”: It should be possible to view A Steady Rain as a tragedy in the tradition of Arthur’s Miller’s A View From the Bridge wherein circumstances beyond a protagonist’s control lead him to an action he knows will destroy him, but he does it anyway. The end of the story is a product of inevitability, not predictability. There is much in this play that can support such a reading, but in the end, such a reading collapses like Denny Lombardo’s life, and the ending is not inevitable; what happens is within Denny’s control, is his own fault and that has been the case since he and his partner, Joey, were best friends in “kinnygarden” [sic].
The scene is a gritty interrogation room in which beat cops Denny (Joey Collins) and Joey (Michael James Reed) are giving separate accounts to Internal Affairs about a call that went terribly wrong. The guys also fill in their own back stories, events leading up to the night in question, and current circumstances. They are stereotypes in some ways: Both South Siders, Denny is of Italian extraction and Joey’s background is Irish. They went all the way through school and, presumably, the Academy together and constantly insist that they are as close as brothers. And they may be, but only in an extremely dysfunctional family. Denny, the smaller man, is the Alpha dog in the partnership, and Joey has been both in awe and afraid of him all their lives. At first, Joey seems good-natured and Denny is protective. Joey practically lives with Denny’s family because Denny is trying to keep him from drinking, an irony that will become obvious soon enough.
The things Denny does are all kinds of wrong, and Collins plays him with passion and nuance. I believe Joey has a finer line to walk in performing a passive-aggressive character, and Reid is more than up to it. If one ignores the incidents and pays attention only to the performances and staging, this is a great play. But there are those words, words and more words. It is an interesting device to have long bits of narrative delivered as both monologue and dialogue to show us what happens and to fully develop unseen characters such as Rhonda, the prostitute, and Connie, the wife Denny has and Joey wants. They outline the low lifes they encounter in their work. They are especially vocal in their assertions that both of them have been passed over for promotion due to minorities receiving preferential treatment, but that’s all just a part of the shit sandwich guys like them have to eat every day.
The actors’ Chicago dialects are strong, but that wasn’t distracting once I stopped thinking about Elwood Blues describing the black-and-white in which he picks up Jake at Joliet (“a cAHp, motor, cAHp tires, cAHp suspension” etc.). All the technical aspects are just right, especially sound (Rusty Wandall) and lights (Peter Sargent). The persistent rain provides background noise (as well as a 95-minute metaphor) and occasional bursts of music introduce and punctuate the action. The staging is fine: chairs apart, chairs together, both men sweating under Sargent’s hot lights dramatizing the stress of interrogation and the intersection of fear, loss and regret. Really, really bad things happen here, and no punches are pulled.
And yet, I just wasn’t satisfied overall. The seminal event in the play is telegraphed in the interview with the playwright, and I wish I were one of those people (the majority, I think) who don’t read programs. We can see the resolution, such as it is, coming from Halstead to Broadway. Most of the time I was interested, some of the time, I was impatient; and at the end of it all, I was almost surprised that a plain-clothes dick didn’t come up to one of the main characters and remind him to “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chi-Town.”
A Steady Rain runs through Feb. 5, 2011, at the Rep. For information, you may visit www.repstil.org. Andrea Braun also reviews for KDHX 88.1 St. Louis and kdhx.org.
BY: ANDREA BRAUN – THEATRE CORRESPONDENT
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