During the years that John Conroy was writing about police torture for the Reader, he and I sat at his kitchen table when each new story was done and went through it line by line. Every quote, every date, every significant specific needed to be checked against its source—which Conroy had collected in a box full of carefully labeled folders. He was practicing high-wire journalism. The facts had to be unimpeachable.
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Conroy’s play, My Kind of Town, opens this week at TimeLine Theatre. The commander’s scenes are gone—he is no longer a role. TimeLine’s artistic director, P.J. Powers, and the play’s director, Nick Bowling, wanted to put on Conroy’s play and they wanted to change it. “It was hard,” says Conroy. “It’s the first play I’ve ever written, and I was so tied to the real story for so long that I had too much journalism in the initial drafts. But in the end, once I could get away from the journalism, it became easier. Unlike journalism, where it matters if someone is on the fifth floor or the 26th floor, in theater it doesn’t matter at all. In a way, I think it becomes a more universal story, and so it was better. It was actually much better. Every character is now a reinvention of reality. Every character has no resemblance to any particular person or location.”
As for the Burge character, Conroy said Bowling and Powers told him, “We think this play would be stronger if we could concentrate the drama on fewer and fewer people. We could ramp up the tension for each individual character.” More than 100 men have alleged that they were tortured by Burge or cops under him, and in the script Conroy gave TimeLine there were only two—and just two cops accused of torture. But Powers and Bowling wanted the focus even tighter. Conroy set to work. “I realized the head of the unit that tortured people was extraneous,” Conroy says. “He’d been there mostly to give the point of view of the people who decided to torture. But I could do that with the other character in the play that tortures.
The troubled prisoner is now onstage for the same reason the police commander is off—the play works better this way. “I guess our point was to keep that character more in people’s imaginations,” artistic director P.J. Powers says. “This story isn’t so much about the baddest of the bad guys, if you will, it’s more about all those who were complicit. I think it’s more interesting seeing the second, third, and fourth layers of people who turned a blind eye.”
Eighteen months ago I reported that Conroy had been hired to be senior investigator of the Better Government Association. But it wasn’t a good fit and Conroy left several weeks ago. “It’s a good thing I’m not working,” he told me as opening night approached. “I’d be going absolutely crazy if I were.”
5/11-6/29: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, TimeLine Theatre Company, 615 W. Wellington, 773-218-8463, timelinetheatre.com, $22-$42.
