Playreaders: “Two Cops and Life on the Streets of Chicago” || St. Paul’s Anglican Church

TWO COPS AND LIFE ON THE STREETS OF CHICAGO:
A NEW PLAYREADER DRAMA

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday
January 22, 23 and 24
7:00 pm

St. Paul’s

By Henry Vermillion

Denny is a Chicago cop.  He is Italian, rash and impulsive.  But, next to his job, his wife and kids are the most important thing in the world to him.

Joey, his partner and best friend since the third grade, is single, and is like a member of Joey´s family; he eats with them, he baby-sits the kids—he´s their best friend, too. Trouble enters when the two policemen release a naked, hysterical Pakistani teenager into the custody of a blonde Anglo man.  The boy shortly meets a horrible fate at the man´s hands, and Denny and Joey are brought up on charges for not following the book in the case.

The play is called “A Steady Rain”, by Keith Huff, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, and will be presented at St Paul´s Church (on Cardo # 6) next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, January 22, 23, and 24.

A critic wrote: “Huff elevates to tragic dimensions the life of policemen the way Arthur Miller moulded Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”…”A Steady Rain” is the most potent new play on Broadway.”  Time Magazine´s critic wrote:  “The taut 90-minute script builds with a tragic inevitability, yet with a coda of redemption that seems neither forced or fake.”  The language of the two is both earthy and witty.

The play is presented as a duolog between the two friends.  Sometimes they tell us what has  happened, sometimes they speak to each other. Fil Farmicola plays Denny, and Howard Bach plays Joey; Henry Vermillion directs, and Dic Simandl handles light and sound.  Admission is $30 pesos.  The doors open at 7 pm, and the play begins at 7:30, unless the house is full, in which case the play begins earlier.

The San Miguel Playreaders is a local tradition going back more than forty years.  It began with theater fans reading plays aloud to each other in private homes.