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Arts & Entertainment

Theater Review: 'A Steady Rain'

A cop melodrama at Dobama masterfully targets painful truths

Anyone who has watched even a modicum of television has seen enough police procedurals and cop-buddy duos to last several lifetimes. But that doesn’t mean this well-trodden genre is completely played out.

Case in point: A Steady Rain by Keith Huff, . This is a play that feels gritty in all the right ways, delving into areas of friendship, loyalty and morality in ways that most behind-the-badge soap operas never touch. And thanks to two sure-handed performances and tight, unfussy direction by Joel Hammer, Huff’s language crackles with the fearful urgency of gunfire in the night.

Joey and Denny are two Chicago patrolmen who have been passed over for promotions multiple times due to personal issues involving, among other things, boozing and racial insensitivity. Friends since kindergarten, Denny (a hot-tempered Italian with a wife and kids) and Joey (an easygoing but often morose bachelor) know each other so well they can push each other’s buttons like concert pianists.

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The play is structured around their tangled lives (Joey is in love with Denny’s wife) and their separate testimonies before Internal Affairs. Each man relates different perspectives regarding the one crucial day, and decision, that had terrible consequences for everyone involved.

It’s a dicey theatrical format, since everything critical has happened in the past and the audience is only hearing the details in the form of recollections. This can often be a sterile and distancing device. But playwright Huff strings credible, surprisingly clever cop talk like a poet emeritus of urban precincts, giving almost every moment the unmistakable thump of honesty.

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As Denny, Jeremy Kendall is hot-wired from the start as he angrily relates how a gunshot shattered a window in his home, the flying glass severely injuring his young son. As that story plays out, involving a grudge-holding pimp and other lowlifes, Kendall shows how Denny’s flexible moral compass led him astray and may have contributed to the tragic event at the center of the play.

In the less-showy role of Joey, Scott Plate is a wonder. Sporting a flat, monotone accent that’s as true to Chicago as the duck fat fries at Hot Doug’s, Plate manages to invest his character with a wide spectrum of ethical strengths and emotional weaknesses. So at the end, we completely believe the unexpected way his life intersects with others.

Played on a simple platform set in a cozy theater space (one side wing of Dobama’s panoramic seating has been eliminated), director Hammer keeps Joey and Denny in your face, where they belong.  

A Steady Rain gained some notoriety on Broadway with a 2009 production starring film heartthrobs Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. But with all due respect to James Bond and Wolverine, the two cops patrolling the stage at Dobama take a back seat to no one.

A Steady Rain, through March 20. Dobama Theatre, 2340 Lee Road, 216-932-3396.  Ticket prices: $10-$25.

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