Billy Albrecht and Harry Strong are good improv partners. Not only do they give each other creative suggestions, they also catch each other’s energy. When Albrecht commands Strong to pretend that he is “learning to fly,” Strong pauses a moment in perplexity, then is seized with inspiration. He consults an imaginary textbook, scrutinizes his arm’s curvature as if comparing it to a wing, adjusts his posture and checks the book again. Albrecht laughs at his partner’s uncanny evocation of what it’s like to take the first steps toward mastering a new skill.
Considering how well they work together, you wouldn’t guess Albrecht and Strong are considered by some to be natural adversaries — or that one of them is wearing a gun.
The 6-foot-plus Strong is a police officer in the Bridgeport community. Albrecht, a slim 17-year-old, is on the cusp of that age when boys in his neighborhood start clashing with the police. But thanks to an innovative new program using theater to bring cops and kids together, Albrecht and Strong have abandoned their natural enmities in favor of exploring their creative sides.
“I didn’t like cops that much,” said Albrecht, who lives in West Town. “I’m from this neighborhood and they gave me a lot of trouble. But the ones I’ve met here are pretty decent. They’re not bad like the ones out there.”
The Police/Teen Link Program was the brainchild of Sharon Evans, the artistic director of Live Bait Theater. Last year, when an official in the department’s Neighborhood Relations division asked her to write a play about the police to be performed in schools, Evans began imagining other, better ways to foster understanding.
“What I suggested was that if I were to write (a play), it wouldn’t be particularly authentic,” she said. “But if we brought together kids and police officers and formed an improv troupe, then we could transcribe from their scenes and maybe create something that was authentic. He didn’t understand how that could work and I said was like, `Well, trust me.'”
Evans began by bringing some officers together to do creative writing exercises. She ran an ad in the police department’s newsletter asking for participants and was surprised by the response.
“I got 50 calls,” she said. “It was so fascinating why they were calling back. Some wanted to work with kids. Some wanted to express their creativity. Some just wanted to do something positive — like I got the sense that their jobs were just sort of weighing on them.”
Originally conceived as a way to help inner-city kids understand and trust the police, Evans’ program became equally important as an outlet for the officers. In fact, at one recent class held at West Town’s Eckhart Park, there were five officers and only two kids.
“It wasn’t a hard sell,” Strong said, explaining how his partner persuaded him to give the program a try. “Most of the children I come in contact with are scared. The only thing they see the police do [is] handling police business — making arrests or something to that effect. So they get to know that isn’t all we do and that we are people too.”
“For the police officers this was something really important,” said Neil McNamara, one of the program facilitators. “The way their lives are structured, it’s so pressure-oriented, more so than any other field. And then you get them in this situation where maybe they had a hard day or chased down a couple criminals and this gives them a release.”
As if to demonstrate the truth of McNamara’s claim, Strong recently missed a class because he broke his elbow pursuing a suspect. Sitting at home waiting for his arm to heal, he has no trouble pinpointing why the improv program appeals to him.
“You can actually come in contact with some people [other than] the criminal element or other police officers or family,” he said. “Those are the only people you come in contact with [ordinarily]. You never have any time to sit down and get to know anybody and be yourself.”
The exercises led by Evans’ facilitators are designed precisely to get people to be themselves — often in ways they hadn’t anticipated. One game had everyone striking silly poses and shouting unrelated words. Another resembled musical chairs. The Eckhart Park field house, where the group met, isn’t air conditioned, and soon a couple of the cops who came in uniform hung their heavy bullet-proof vests on the coat rack.
Not the guns, though — those stayed with the officers. Though most of the cops came out of uniform, they still wore their heavy black belts complete with safety holsters. One cop fingered his unconsciously when it was his turn to stand alone in front of the group.
But rather than feeling intimidated by the presence of so many large, armed individuals, Albrecht and 13-year-old Alex Patterson seemed completely comfortable. Evans noted that although both groups of participants were standoffish at first, “Now there is, on both sides, a lot more touching and spontaneous laughing and so on.”
“Not all cops are the same,” Albrecht explained. “Some do their job [one] way, some of the good cops do it [another] way. I think kind of differently about cops now.”
Patterson, in particular, was transformed by the class. When he arrived he seemed shy and spoke softly. But after the facilitators led the group through several games with names like “Zip Zap Zop” and “Bird Beast Fish,” Patterson’s reserve vanished. He volunteered to act out scenes in front of the group and wasn’t fazed by partnering with a police officer. Soon he was enthusiastically miming repairing a bicycle and eating a cantaloupe. When the session ended, though, he grew quiet again.
“I want to be an actor,” he said hesitantly. He added that he had wanted to do the program to work with police, but wasn’t sure why. “I like to act out scenes. I enjoy the class because it makes me feel relaxed.”
“We all have barriers set up,” McNamara explained. “Some of these teens come in and your first reaction is, `Oh, my god, these kids are in gangs or they’re angry about something.’ [But] when you get them in a playful atmosphere where they’re performing and having fun with these games, all that stuff is gone and you see them for who they are. I think that’s really what changed the program from `let’s put something together and do a show,’ to something that is really important [for the participants].”
Now Evans’ only hope is that the police department will come to agree with her about the program’s importance. The department has tolerated rather than encouraged Evans so far. She obtained foundation grants to pay for an initial series of weekly sessions at Eckhart and Gill parks, and now is searching for ways to expand the program.
“To see the kids and officers together is amazing,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re rediscovering each other as human beings.”
