Playwright: Keith Huff. At: Chicago Commercial Collective at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. Tickets: 312-633-0630; www.asteadyrainchicago.com; $40. Runs through: Sept. 4
The prototype for Keith Huff's fable of cops-gone-wrong is the 1949 drama, Detective Story, Sidney Kingsley's caveat against self-mythologizing. In this classic drama, a well-meaning public servant has grown so unbending in his morality that he forgets the distinction between heroism and hubris. "Humble yourself, Shamus," the precinct's beat reporter warns the overzealous officer in danger of losing his humanity.
Huff has pared this noiresque tragedy down to two uniformed patrolmen seated in a police interrogation room, recounting the events leading up to the bloodbath under investigation. They are Denny Lombardi and Joey Doyle, whose occupational relationship continues the dynamic forged during their blue-collar childhoods. It soon becomes apparent that Denny has always fancied himself a protector of the innocent and weaka role permitting him privileges beyond those of lesser menwhile flawed Joey readily admits to his own need for the improving influence offered by his partner's idyllic family life.
The world of crime is an ugly and violent one, but more destructive than this is its fundamental disorder. In subcultures where the small assurances born of communal accord break down utterly, the uncertainty inherent to all life on this planet is magnified hundredfold. A lone mortal professing to uphold the law to the extreme of thinking that he OWNS it becomes, himself, a proponent of the chaos encroaching on the peace that he struggles so mightily to preserve. When, inevitably, his efforts prove futile, his failure cannot help but brand him, in his own eyes, a villainlike those he is sworn to destroy.
In a film, our play's action would be fragmented by locating shots of the many pinpoint-specific geographical sites referenced in the script, and in a bigger theater, such as that housing its profitable and ill-conceived transfer to New York's Broadway, Huff's vivid portrait of his city's mean streets would be diluted by sheer physical distance. The newly formed Chicago Commercial Collective, however, has reassembled the 2008 premiere production, under Russ Tutterow's direction, in the elbow-to-elbow quarters of Chicago Dramatists, where a visibly weathered Randy Steinmeyer and Peter DeFaria look us right in the eyes as they make their grimy, foul-mouthed, heartbreaking confessionasking not forgiveness, but only compassion for those who love their job not wisely, but too well. If you see this playand the news headlines would indicate that this is the time to do sothen this is the place to do it.