BWW Reviews: SET's Riveting A STEADY RAIN

Two men, a table, and two chairs comprise the entirety of A Steady Rain's stage picture at Springs Ensemble Theater. The play feels larger than that. Keith Huff's words paint a picture as violent, harrowing, and human as any film noir.

Speaking separately and in tandem, Chicago beat cops Denny (Steve Emily) and Joey (Matt Radcliffe) spin a tale of collapsing personal and professional lives, and the effect is as vivid as if Tarantino had brought it to the screen in all its gruesome glory. By the end, we're not only intimately familiar with the two officers, best friends since childhood and torn apart by conflicting interests, but with everyone surrounding them: Denny's wife and children, a prostitute, her pimp, a desperate Vietnamese boy, and more. When violent scenes are described, you can almost see the blood and hear the bones cracking. This is oral storytelling at its finest.

When we first meet Joey and Denny, they've been passed over for promotion yet again. Denny blames affirmative action, but it soon becomes apparent that the cops have their own flaws holding them back: Joey is a recovering alcoholic, Denny is brutish to colleagues and suspects alike and is also on the take with several prostitutes. When the effects of Denny's shady dealings hit too close to home, it triggers a series of events snowballing into inevitable tragedy and haunted by a persistent downpour that grips the area. ("I blamed it on the rain" crops up twice in the dialogue, unwisely bringing the specter of Milli Vanilli into the proceedings.)

Sarah S. Shaver's light design guides the transitions and emphasizes plot points, but the effectively sparse set and direction (by June Scott Barfield and David Plambeck respectively) place all the burden of carrying the story on the two actors, and Emily and Radcliffe shoulder it well. As a bachelor longing for something to live for and tormented by his feelings for his partner's wife, Radcliffe infuses Joey with a kind of desperate dignity, but it is Emily's Denny who captures the imagination. He is a man who feels deeply yet can only express those feelings in the coarsest of manners, which combined with a mixture of self-reliance and self-justification makes for an increasingly volatile human cocktail.

At times, it feels like A Steady Rain should be a movie (and it may yet become one; Stephen Spielberg has expressed an interest), and yet it also feels like expanding the picture would make it lose focus. It is first and last a story of two men, closer than brothers and further apart than the stars, and it should be heard in their own words.

Springs Ensemble Theater's unforgettable production of A STEADY RAIN plays now through October 27th, Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30pm with Sunday matinees on October 20th and 27th at 4pm. For tickets and information, contact 719-357-3080 or visit springsensembletheatre.org.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emory John Collinson

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