Carl Sandburg called Chicago the "city of the Big Shoulders." In Chicago playwright Keith Huff's A Steady Rain, those shoulders are not only big but splattered with blood, rain and bile.
Huff's two-character police drama enjoyed a long run in a small Chicago theater before becoming a 2009 Broadway hit (starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig). Now it has checked into L.A.'s Odyssey Theatre for a two-month run with Thomas Vincent Kelly and Sal Viscuso taking on the acting challenge. And what a challenge it is. Working on a bare stage, both men must aim a barrage of words at each other and at the audience, which, in small-theater fashion, is seated at arm's length from them, making for an intense, visceral connection.
Huff takes on the familiar set-up of good cop, bad cop and turns it on its head. Joey (Kelly) and Denny (Viscuso) are not only police buddies but friends from childhood; thus they know each other's strengths and weaknesses. They prowl Chicago's back streets together, taking on the crime, violence and corruption that have turned those streets into cesspits.
Unlike the typical representations of law enforcement on TV, there is no clear-cut division of good and evil in A Steady Rain. Joey and Denny are not knights in shining armor, just deeply flawed, contradictory human beings trying desperately to do some good out there, knowing at the same time that the forces lined up against them are impossible to overcome.
Huff calls his play a duologue; Joey and Denny not only clash verbally with each other but with an unseen police board of inquiry, having been charged with dereliction of duty in a case involving a serial killer. (The inspiration here was the Jeffrey Dahmer story, in which the cops mistakenly and tragically failed to arrest the murderer when he was in their custody). The shame and guilt Joey and Denny feel is only matched by the anger and resentment that boils up in them when they realize they are being exploited not just by the press but their hypocritical, self-aggrandizing bosses. The emotional stakes are raised even higher when Denny discovers that Joey is in love with his wife.
Huff's pressure-cooker dialogue, which is shot through with street-lingo and profanity, keeps up its intensity from beginning to end. The playwright's storytelling skills are equally impressive: he knows how to hold the audience on the edge of its seat for 95 straight minutes.
