A Cop Reviews a Cop Play

It rained all night in Oklahoma City the night after Thanksgiving. This was bad news to me because my partner and I had agreed to do a ride-along for Ben Hall and Mike Waugh, two local actors performing in Carpenter Square's production of "A Steady Rain," a play about two Chicago cops. We regretfully warned Ben and Mike that rain usually slows us down. I had hoped we would spend the shift beating the bushes, talking to the prostitutes and pimps who frequent our sector, and looking into the dilapidated low-rent housing of the inner city (in neighborhoods remarkably similar to south Chicago). Along the way, I thought we would have plenty of time to tell Mike and Ben about the both the triumphs and the frustrations of big city police work. So I was disappointed that the rain threatened to derail that.

We did manage to show the guys a few things. Mike (who rode with me) got to talk to a couple of meth addicts and, through talking about then hearing reference to a notable ghetto figure called "Mama K," he got a picture of the interesting close-knit networking of the city's underbelly. He also watched a creative arrest. Perhaps most importantly, since the play takes place in a summer when it rained non-stop in Chicago, the guys got to think about what unrelenting rain might be like to guys who spend entire nights in a car.

I don't know how much the ride-alongs helped Ben and Mike. But I hope they were able to take away some lessons about how cops live, think, and act in a world defined by grey. I've always thought that the hallmark of inner-city police work is the often fuzzy lines between the good guys and bad guys, legal and illegal, aggressive and abusive. The officer's primary struggle comes in negotiating this grey. And whether one ends up as a good cop or a bad one depends in large part on where he ends up when he's passed through a grey deeper than the rainiest Chicago twilight.

It is capturing this grey that Keith Huff did so well in crafting this very rich script. Both characters, Joey and Denny, are both quite good and also very bad. As Linda McDonald, the director and my former teacher, mentor, and friend, explained to me after I saw the show last Friday, "both characters are likable in their own way. But one of them loses his soul and the other finds it."

Indeed, as a city cop myself (a good one, I hope), I saw myself in both these characters. I appreciated Joey's (Ben Hall) heart. He is a cop who wants to do it right, despite a crippling addiction. And when Denny (Mike Waugh) railed against the seemingly illogical unfairness of the police department, I found it hard to keep from shouting out loud, "damn right!" even when I knew that he had brought his situation on himself. These character were both good cops, and bad cops--they were also both incredibly human characters whose stories were tragic and heartfelt. Of course, as anyone would when watching a play about their profession, I thought the script got some things wrong. But it rose well above the typical cop-movie stereotypes that Huff intentionally subverts.

Mike and Ben handled these characters with remarkable aplomb. Ben's narrative delivery is often lyrical and always empathetic. Mike (who I had seen in The Goat: or Who is Sylvia) was superb playing Denny, a character who can be hateful, but who the audience must ultimately love. They work well together as well, a difficult task when one considers that they must play characters who have been "best friends since kindergarten."

I am a former professional actor, failed playwright, and professional police officer and, thus, likely the most difficult audience this play could have had. And I was very impressed. I empathized and commiserated with these characters, and I have spent the last three days since thinking about the script. And that's what I like in a play.

"A Steady Rain" runs at CST through February 4th. Go see it.

What Toothbrushes Taught Me About Ways of Seeing

Since our boys were brand new, we have organized things by color in order to keep straight what belongs to which kid. The phrase "Blue is for Beckett," has been a mantra in our house for the last two and a half years. When they were newborns, we would dress Beckett in blue so that others knew which kid was which. Though we have pretty much dropped color coding their clothing (Beckett, as it turns out, likes much brighter colors), we still use this to organize items that they should not share.

Beckett's milk cup is still blue because Aodan needs lactose free milk, so the coloring helps us keep the two types of milk separate. We also keep their toothbrushes separated by color. Blue is for Beckett. But we recently learned that even this simple system is not fool-proof. Even something as seemingly straight forward as color scheme is, as it turns out, subject to interpretation.

I learned this when we were both in the bathroom at the same time while I was brushing the boys' teeth. Charissa said something like, "oh, you switched their tooth brushes. I guess it doesn't matter." Of course, I hadn't. I was using the blue toothbrush to brush Beckett's teeth, so I replied, "blue is for Beckett." I then learned that she thought the other toothbrush was the blue one. We had been using opposite toothbrushes the entire time we've had this set. She is not, by the way, color blind. Nor am I. But we saw these two toothbrushes very differently, obviously.

Every geeky kid with an existential streak will remember the moment when he began to wonder whether or not people really do see colors the same way. What if what I see as blue, you see as red? We would never know that what we saw was different because we would both always call what we were seeing blue. This is the kind of question that is interesting from a theoretical perspective but that really doesn't matter much. As long as we consistently call that color blue, it doesn't really matter what it looks like to us, we can still communicate about the color consistently. But what was happening here was something different.

When I asked Charissa what she saw when she looked at these toothbrushes, she said that the one on the left was a green toothbrush with blue trim, and the one on the right was a blue toothbrush with purple trim. This is because the bases and the very tops of these toothbrushes are green and blue, respectively.

But I see these completely differently. I see the long necks on these toothbrushes and the fats parts on the handles, so I see them as blue (on the left) and purple (on the right). So, though we both see the same colors, we define which color is predominant, and thus definitive, in different ways.

This hints at a fundamental difference in the way my wife and I see things. What I see as trim, or background noise, she sees as defining characteristics. From my perspective, it seems like she sees a negative image of the same world I see. What's unimportant to me, is definitive to her.

Of course, to what extent our way of seeing toothbrushes is analogous to our ways of seeing the rest of the world is not settled. But the lesson here is still an interesting one. My wife and I, despite sharing our lives together, and despite the fact that we agree on most things and have an extraordinary number of things in common, see the world through different eyes, and may perceive it completely differently.

And ultimately, we name things according to how we see them. We see things according to how we define their characteristics. So, which characteristics we see as important--as definitive--has everything to do with how we name the world.