Word: huffs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even in his hometown of Chicago, Keith Huff was hardly a playwriting superstar. Though the author of about 50 plays, many of them produced at respected Second City theaters like Steppenwolf and Chicago Dramatists, he still needed a day job--editing for a medical website--to help support himself, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter. Yet now he's a Broadway hot ticket. True, he has a couple of big movie stars to thank--Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, who were somehow persuaded to star in his play A Steady Rain. But they're only helping affirm...
...recount, in alternating monologues, a harrowing chain of events that tears their lifelong friendship apart. The material is familiar to streetwise fans of Hollywood crime films and TV cop shows--the prostitutes and lowlifes, shocking violence and moral compromises faced by cops who patrol the urban jungle. But Huff's vivid, intricately layered script--a mix of straight narration, interlaced commentary and re-created scenes--lifts it far above the usual clichés, both detaching us from the melodrama and imbuing it with the force of tragedy...
...Huff's play outshines the two other Chicago offerings that have opened so far this fall: Letts' Superior Donuts, a relatively formulaic comedy-drama about a crusty inner-city doughnut-shop owner and the black kid who comes to work for him, and Oleanna, Mamet's scathing account of a bogus sexual-harassment charge that was too polemically freighted back in 1992 and has the added disadvantage of seeming dated today. But collectively, they showcase much of what makes Chicago theater so distinct and vital. The City of Big Shoulders produces big-shouldered theater as well--thematically ambitious, emotionally juiced...
...Huff's monologues come alive in a way most conventional plays don't. In recounting the horrific, but hardly implausible, series of events that push their friendship to the breaking point, the two cops narrate much of the action; occasionally comment indirectly on each other's recollections; sometimes re-create actual scenes together. Cumulatively, the effect is to drain the sometimes shocking events of any melodrama, to force us to see them with the same resigned, matter-of-fact detachment these characters do. The taut, 90-minute script builds with a tragic inevitability, yet with a coda of redemption that...
...Huff's play has the advantage, of course, of Jackman and Craig. Yes, you can be cynical about the two movie hunks who are drawing lines of autograph seekers outside the theater every night - as well as the producers smart enough to turn an obscure 2006 play by a little-known Chicago playwright into a box-office bonanza. But once the actors step onstage, all that dissipates. This is one star vehicle that should provide a good ride for plenty of non-star actors to come...