Our Kind of (Torturing) Town

Dan Breen seems to undergo a diabolical transformation as he speaks from the podium. The wise-cracking garrulous police officer who collects old coats for the homeless takes on a chilling fascistic visage as his speech crescendos: ​“God bless Jack, God bless you and God bless the city of Chicago!”

Meanwhile Otha Jeffries undergoes a transformation of his own before our eyes, from a sensitive if rebellious boy to a man pulsing with violence and rage, handcuffed but ready to burst ​“like a bomb” in his mother’s words, kicking over chairs and foaming at the mouth with impotent anger.

Jeffries and Breen are characters in My Kind of Town, a riveting play by veteran Chicago journalist John Conroy depicting the police torture scandal that he spent two decades chronicling. It plays through July 29 at the TimeLine Theatre in Chicago.

Conroy’s stories for The Chicago Reader, including 1990’s ​“House of Screams,” told horrifying tales of African American men subjected to suffocation, electric shock and other certifiable torture meant to induce confessions under the watch of Vietnam veteran Jon Burge. Conroy’s dogged reporting helped bring to light the systematic and racist injustice that people at all levels of power, including then-state’s attorney and former Mayor Richard M. Daley, seemed determined to ignore.

But as the scandal might otherwise be fading from public consciousness a year after Burge was sentenced to federal prison (on counts of obstruction of justice and perjury), the play confronts viewers in a way more visceral and raw than is possible in newsprint. It lays bare the multiple layers of pain, suffering, terror and despair meted out to men and their families by the coldly calculated methods of obtaining near-100 percent ​“clearance rates” in homicides at the Area Two police district.

Breen (not a real name) is a Chicago cop under the Burge-like figure Jack Gunther, who never actually appears on stage. As played by David Parkes, Breen is a rich character with a trademark Chicago accent who exemplifies the line toed by Burge and his supporters: that police in the city’s toughest districts were dedicated servants doing what it took to protect African-American communities from bloodthirsty gangsters and thugs. Breen’s aforementioned speech is at a fundraiser for Gunther, who, like Burge did in real life, flees to Florida after the department has finally fired him.

Jeffries is a composite of a number of real men who were allegedly tortured by Burge or his underlings, some of them later released from prison after their convictions were deemed wrongful.

Conroy came to write the play ​“almost by accident,” after a local producer suggested the scandal would be perfect for the stage. ​“I didn’t want anybody else to do it so I said yes,” he says. Though he had decades of reporting under his belt, including books about 1980s Belfast and about the police torture, Conroy had never written a play.

​“I didn’t know what I was doing, that’s why it has nine characters,” he says, noting the original draft had 13. ​“But I didn’t want to write a two- or three-character play. I really wanted to indict the city, and I couldn’t do that with two or three characters.”

The play does indeed indict Chicago — the culture of political corruption, racism, segregation and cronyism which allowed the House of Screams to flourish — while at the same time it manages to celebrate the city with spot-on references to north side-south side rivalries and video clips of historic events like the 1967 Big Snow that briefly bridged racial divides.

The sin of looking the other way is embodied in the fictionalized composite state’s attorney Maureen Buckley, who is demoted to the city hall basement after asking too many questions but nevertheless stands up for her ​“tribe” when it comes to the witness box. Conroy plumbs the complicated social dynamics that can arise when families are torn apart by violence, poverty and incarceration. He paints Jeffries’ parents as disturbingly but understandably ambivalent about their son’s release from prison, given his mental breakdown — ​“something snapped,” his mother says — and the danger he likely poses and faces if he is released.

​“I speculated that was something I might feel if my son had gone crazy, he might be homicidal or suicidal,” Conroy says. ​“It was actually something that came from Northern Ireland, where I met mothers who said, ​‘I’m glad my son is inside because at least he won’t get killed there.’”

Conroy says writing a play was much different from journalism, and he had to struggle to ​“divorce himself” from strictly portraying the facts. ​“I had it in my mind the script should be faithful to certain things and one of those was the years,” he notes, but director Nick Bowling eventually convinced him of the importance of condensing a complicated chronology down to two discrete time periods.

Jeffries (played with stunning intensity by Charles Gardner) throws viewers for a loop at the end of the play — SPOILER ALERT! — with a cryptic comment indicating he may be guilty after all. Conroy says this twist was Bowling’s idea to add more drama, and he initially balked. ​“I felt like he’d kicked me in the gut, and Nick said that’s exactly the response we want from the audience. It boils down to the question of is it right to torture anybody regardless of what they’ve done?”

With Burge in prison, most of the officers and prosecutors linked to the scandal (including Daley) retired or deceased and a number of tortured men released from prison, the torture scandal could be fading into the past. But Conroy is adamant that should not happen, and he hopes his play will help keep alive this history and an ongoing struggle for justice.

​“There are still a dozen guys in prison on the basis of suspect confessions,” he says. ​“All they’re asking for is a new hearing, but they’re having to fight this battle on their own. Everyone now knows this torture took place at Area Two, so what does it cost society to examine this small group of cases? Not much! It needs to be done. It’s immoral not to give them a new hearing.”

He adds that people tortured at Area Two who have finished their sentences still cannot seek compensation, since the statute of limitations on filing a civil suit expired long before the evidence of systematic torture came to light. And Conroy notes that the code of silence is still alive and well in the department, as evidenced by the city’s refusal in recent years to release the names of officers with multiple misconduct complaints. A majority of city councilors have demanded such records to help root out ​“bad apples” and relieve taxpayers who are subsidizing millions of dollars in legal settlements against these officers, but the city has resisted.

​“Burge did not act alone,” Conroy said. ​“It’s good there’s been some public recognition in terms of one guy going to prison. But what about the other 30? The system has not changed.”

Conroy never meant to become so focused on a single, ongoing investigation, he says, and he sometimes regrets that he became so publicly associated with that story to the exclusion of his other journalistic interests. But knowing that people’s lives were literally on the line, he couldn’t back off. After the tumultuous changes in the journalism industry Conroy is no longer working as a staff journalist, and it is unlikely today that any Chicago reporter would be paid to cover an investigative story to the dogged extent Conroy did. It makes you wonder what injustices may be occurring now without journalistic scrutiny. For his part, Conroy is focusing less on the foreclosed possibilities of journalism, and more on liberating potential of theater.

​“You can do something in theater that you can’t really do in journalism, which is point the finger at the broader society,” he said. ​“How everybody looked the other way and no one cared.”