Review: A Steady Rain by A Chick and A Dude Productions
by Michael Meigs

Keith Huff imagines a dark, dark world for us, and Shanon Weaver's set design mirrors that. This is Chicago in grim weather. The bare stage has only a couple of banged up folding chairs and a table, and the stage walls are painted in vertical strips of greenish blue and black. It could be an interrogation room but really it's a barren nowhere, a place of the mind that one could just as easily imagine to be a menacing and oppressive jungle.

A Steady Rain doesn't need pretty. This is a work of words, images and animal energy. Kenneth Wayne Bradley and Tom Green are the only ones visible on this stage. They're a pair of cops who've known one another since grammar school, and who now are united in the grueling business of patrolling the city's seamy south side. The stage is their metaphorical cage; they've both taken the exam for promotion to detective three times, and they've both failed.

They're not the only inhabitants of this space. The story they tell, most of the time in alternate monologues, is peopled with others -- Connie the long-suffering wife of Denny (Bradley); a vengeful petty crook who ambushes Denny in an alley, and the crook's young nephew who lures Denny into it; Denny's bloodied and unresponsive young son; Rhonda the hooker who keeps her tiny baby in a dresser drawer; a naked and raving 9-year-old Vietnamese boy and the 'surfer-guy' who calmly takes custody of him; the unsympathetic precinct captain; and a couple of other cops who confront a desperate murderer armed with a service revolver.

Huff's language is so vivid and Ken Bradley's delivery of it is so intense, convincing in rhythm and dialect and so disturbing that one stumbles out of the theatre afterward with images seared into one's imagination, as if one had been standing there next to Denny and Joey as these violent events occurred. You don't need Quentin Tarantino to get your shivers, folks. Huff's prose has a thrust and chop that reminded me of the best of the macabre novelist James Elroy, and he achieves his ends with greater economy and more heart-catching surprise.

Tough cop and soft cop, you know, the classic technique for interrogation, except that here it's used for narration. Huff clues us from the first that we're going into a recap of unknown events and we begin to suspect from very early on that it's a literal post mortem. Kenneth Wayne Bradley's Texas tough guy acting power morphs into the muscled danger of a Northern big-city cop at the end of his rope. Bradley's Denny is a realist and a survivor, casual about shaking down the pimps and the whores but vengeful and protective when crime threatens his family.

Tom Green as sidekick Joey is the convincing Beta to Denny's Alpha male.  Green's a loser, too, but an affable one, a guy who has put up with Denny's punches, sarcasm and loud talk in part because he has nowhere else to go. Since Joey's marriage failed, he's been over at Denny and Rhonda's so often that he's like an uncle to the kids. He takes Denny's ragging and abuse with the patient endurance of a masochist, compensated only in part when Denny follows up with the exuberant declaration, "I love ya, Joey!"

The actors and their director Melissa Livingston-Weaver establish a fierce rhythm, beautifully modulated and controlled according to the events of the story. It's not an emotional roller coaster; it's more of a wild and unpredictable squad car chase through threatening streets under the maddening splash of a steady rain of accident, intimidation and revenge.

They're plausible and complete actors, each immersed in his hard-driven persona.  There's one disconnect, gnawingly evident: though they're presented as contemporaries, or at least former classmates, their appearance suggests an age difference of as much as ten years, with Bradley the younger of the two. It's easily rationalized away; perhaps life on the streets and in the squad car is simply harder on Joey. A Steady Rain remains a complete, compelling and immersive experience.

Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, February 28

Review by Ryan E. Johnson for austinlifestylemag.com, March 30

EXTRA

Click to view the program for A Steady Rain

A Steady Rain
by Keith Huff
A Chick and A Dude Productions