The play’s called “Escape” and there are some crimes committed in it. So it’s about bad guys making their getaway, right? Or maybe hostages getting free?
Well, no. Turns out there’s a third possibility, an unexpected set of characters looking for a way out of trouble: the Chicago police.
“The title refers to the different ways officers cope with the job,” said playwright Sharon Evans in an e-mail. “I have found that to deal with the grimness of the work, many officers create a variety of outlets. One detective I met tango danced; I heard about another who was obsessed with the squirrels outside the district house and fed them every day.”
Evans gathered these tidbits and others over the course of years spent working with members of the Chicago Police Department on various arts-oriented community outreach efforts. As artistic director of Live Bait Theater, Evans first connected with the city’s finest through a program called Police-Teen Link that gets cops and young people improvising together.
“I’ve been hanging out with police once a week for the last seven years,” she says. “I hear a lot of stuff. This is the story I’m telling this time.”
“Escape” centers on a pair of detectives attached to the Special Victims Unit: Irish-American male Jim and African-American female Terry. They’re investigating two alleged rapes, but Evans cautions that this is neither a procedural nor a whodunit. “It’s sort of [about] the spin-out of these two cases into the relationship of the two partners,” she says. “I think the whole play is about ethics and about people doing their best and still sometimes coming up short.”
‘Escape’
Cops coping with stress
When: Through July 1
Where: Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark St.
Price: $15-$20, 773-871-1212 or www.livebaittheater.org.
