CHICAGO — John Conroy spent 15 years writing investigative news articles about one of the darkest chapters of this city’s Police Department, the allegations that some officers on the South Side regularly resorted to suffocation, electric shock and mock Russian roulette in the 1970s and ’80s to obtain confessions from suspects.
But for all of the official inquiries and overturned convictions that resulted — a special state prosecutors’ report in 2006 supported the accusations of scores of inmates, and the city paid out $20 million in settlements in a case that continues to reverberate today — Mr. Conroy never believed that the people of Chicago were truly outraged by the front-page headlines about police torture. And so, in the tradition of history and morality plays like “A Man for All Seasons” and last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Ruined,” Mr. Conroy turned to theater as a means of provocation and catharsis.
“I wanted to indict the whole city of Chicago,” Mr. Conroy said of his first outing as a playwright, the two-act “My Kind of Town,” which he has developed with help from the Steppenwolf Theater Company here; a third reading is planned for March at Northwestern University.
“I wanted to get at the public indifference, to go up the ladder and look at not only the cops who chose to torture but also at families and society that seemed to accept that some criminals constituted a tortureable class of people,” he added during an interview at a diner that he chose for its popularity with both police officers and suspected gang members.
While Mr. Conroy is a widely respected journalist who wrote for The Chicago Reader for many years, as well as an author (with one book about Northern Ireland and another about torture), creating a play has been full of challenges for him, he said. One was mastering the form and pacing of a multicharacter stage drama that spans 27 years; for that he studied plays like August Wilson’s “Fences,” which follows a family over several years.
Dramas based on historical events can sometimes have a bloodless quality, said Martha Lavey, the artistic director of Steppenwolf, and leave audiences feeling that they are being taught a lesson rather than being plunged into rich drama.
“What we’ve encouraged John to think about is how to keep the material feeling fresh and alive,” Ms. Lavey said. “The question for a playwright is: How do you basically report history in such a way where something is at stake in the present? What’s at stake in John’s play can’t just be the facts of the case but the relationships among the characters, the ways that the characters deal with eternal issues like truth and betrayal.”
The play involves three interlocking stories: an African-American police officer and his ex-wife, whose son was tortured in custody; a young prosecutor who is haunted by the knowledge that she may have witnessed officers preparing to torture a criminal; and a police detective and his family torn apart by the scandal.
While the brutality is described but not shown, there are several wrenching moments, including a scene in which a convicted man recalls how he was sodomized with a cattle prod to force a confession to a murder — and then, minutes later, suffocated with a plastic bag when officers wanted him to confess to a second murder as well.
“And I thought I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die right here,” the character says of the suffocation, continuing later, “And they took it off before I died and I hollered and then the light went back on and they’re sitting in chairs, Gunther standing against the wall, like nothing happened. And one of them says, two murders, and I said nothing, I couldn’t get enough air, I couldn’t think hardly, and the light went out again and I hollered, ‘Two murders.’ Then the light went back on, they’s all sitting like nothing happened, and they said, ‘That’s what we thought.’ ”
While Mr. Conroy said his play was a work of fiction, the character Gunther — a commander who oversees the officers applying the torture — is clearly inspired by a real-life former commander in the South Side Police Area 2, Jon Burge. A decorated Vietnam veteran and often-promoted police officer, Commander Burge was removed from the force in 1993 after the Chicago Police Board found him guilty of physically abusing an accused murderer in the 1980s. Mr. Burge is scheduled to go to court again in May, this time on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice; he is accused of lying about his involvement in torturing suspects.
Mr. Burge did not respond to an interview request made through one of his lawyers, Marc Martin. In a telephone interview Mr. Martin said of Mr. Conroy’s play, “I’m glad he’s representing it as fiction, because based on our investigation of this case, the allegations about Commander Burge are fiction.”
From the Greeks to Shakespeare and Brecht the theater has a long if irregular history of morality plays. Some are about the life and death struggles of real people, like Thomas More and Anne Frank; more recent examined the clash of ideas and values of historical figures, like two Tony Award-winning plays of the last decade, Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” and Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia.”
For “Ruined,” the celebrated drama about emotionally and physically mutilated prostitutes in war-torn Congo, the playwright Lynn Nottage drew on interviews with women during trips to Africa in 2004 and 2005. Like Mr. Conroy, she said that she decided to create her own fictional version of the world rather than write a play based on the verbatim words of the women, because she wanted creative room to tell a story with an epic sweep. She also did not want to exploit their stories for any personal gain, she said.
Ms. Nottage said in an interview that writers working on history and morality plays have to make careful choices, to construct powerful narratives that audiences in any country or city can relate to.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about how to tell the story because I didn’t want it to be preachy, didn’t want to be up on the soapbox telling the audience how to feel or what to think,” Ms. Nottage said. One choice she made was to have the characters perform songs that included some of the most pointed and emotionally direct lines in the play. “I think that when people are listening to music, they enter a certain kind of comfort zone where they are open to hearing things that they might reject otherwise.”
Whatever his own personal views about Mr. Burge and the torture allegations, Mr. Conroy also had the audience partly in mind when he chose not to render many clear-cut judgments in “My Kind of Town.” He said he preferred to shade most of the characters with moral ambiguities, an approach that he hoped would draw in Chicago audiences and stimulate conversations about their own feelings on torture.
“I’m not a ‘gotcha’ reporter, and I wasn’t out to paint cops in any simplistic good-and-evil way,” said Mr. Conroy, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, Skokie, and was an English major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “And I didn’t want to tell a story that said that the guilty cops have to be punished or the righteous have to win, but rather that these were real human beings who had to make choices that we as a society need to see — and that those choices had consequences that we as a society and city need to deal with.”
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Detective Shavedlongcock:
Crimes, corrpution and police brutality... It sells and the public eats it up....
The sad thing is that I am sure that the public will believe that they really had cattle prods at A/2 and they were shoving them up the bad guys asses. Thanks to LeftIsTheBest for this submission.
Mayor Landrieu, right, has the task of rebuilding New Orleans
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