Audio By Carbonatix
When Chicago journalist Connie Fletcher delved into the lives of over 100 police officers for her 1991 book What Cops Know: Cops Talk About What They Do, How They Do It, and What It Does to Them, she had an “in” among her subjects: her sister the police officer. “I come from a large Irish family where everybody talks over everyone else all the time,” Fletcher recalls. “But after my little sister Julie became a police officer, she always held the floor.” Julie’s storytelling flair, something Fletcher says comes innately to cops, inspired her to seek out more stories for a magazine article, which in turn led to a book offer. The result was an intensive and unexpurgated oral history steeped in the whys and wherefores of how cops deal with daily shell shock and the inexplicable absurdities — both horrible and humorous — of human behavior.
The stuff of good television drama, you say? Well, that’s been done to death. Fletcher’s collection took a different dramatic route, ending up as a telling theater piece adapted by Kenn Frandsen ten years ago for Chicago’s Live Bait Theater. Fletcher says she went to see the play thirteen times back then and loved it – but, she adds, “My word isn’t as good as that of the cops who saw it: Many of the cops I interviewed also came and brought their families.”
What Cops Know has perhaps never been more relevant than it is now, in post-9/11 America at war, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed locally by the Industrial Arts Theatre Company: IAT’s production of the play, a blend of moving monologues, archetypal characters and sparsely dramatized events, opens April 3 at the company’s new venue, the Federal Theatre, for a month-long run. It’s a bold debut (IAT originally planned to open with Barefoot in the Park, which has been pushed back to a later date) that promises to guide audiences through the heart of a world only hinted at by NYPD Blue.
To prepare for their own version of the docudrama, director Tracy Shaffer-Witherspoon and members of the IAT cast consulted Denver police detective Tyrone Campbell, a unique source who moonlights as a screenwriter. (“He knows our world, too,” says Shaffer-Witherspoon.) With his background, Campbell was able to regale the actors with on-the-spot insights about the so-called brotherhood of police officers — such as why cops all live in the same neighborhood or why, as one character in the play attests, they can’t take out the garbage without carrying a gun — while also assisting them in the theatrical art of dramatic portrayal.
In addition, Campbell arranged for cast members to go on ride-alongs, offering a more immediate taste of the police experience, that peculiar mixture of unwavering boredom upset by adrenaline-pumped moments of excitement.
After getting their feet wet, how the cast members ultimately represent that milieu might surprise audiences. Fletcher offers some predictions: “For one thing, people don’t realize how intelligent cops are. They’re action-oriented, extroverted, and they want to help people. Sometimes they’re embittered, because some people don’t want help. One common denominator was the horror they had of being in an office. They’ll take on horrible assignments to avoid having to sit at a desk. They want to solve problems. They like to think.
“And secondly, people don’t realize how much cops care. The stereotypical image of the hard-bitten, seen-it-all cop isn’t true. If anything, the things homicide or accident cops see — especially things involving kids — make them appreciate what they have, appreciate their own kids more. Sometimes they have to run right home and do a bed check.”
Talk about motivation. It’s there for the taking, and that’s the stuff of live drama.