Bad Plays, Bad Plays; Watcha Gonna Do?: Cops at ACT
Probably no single profession has been more analyzed, mythologized, deconstructed, vilified, or venerated by TV and the movies than that of the Big City Cop. In the late 60s and 70s, with Vietnam and civil rights and Watergate causing Americans to look at virtually every aspect of government with growing skepticism, fictitious portrayals of lawmen darkened to suit the times. The best modern dramatizations of police work focus on its endless potential to corrupt those who practice it (The Shield) or its frequent tedium and futility (The Wire).
Which brings us to Cops, American Century Theatre’s earnest, well-mounted, nicely-acted production of Terry Curtis Fox’s 1976 off-Broadway police play. It would be very easy for this allegedly gritty and certainly profane pastiche to have come out resembling the Max Fischer Players' production of Serpico, as seen all-too-briefly in Rushmore. But it ducks that with strong performances and high production values. Brian Razzino and Regen Wilson, as a pair of waitress-abusing Chicago detectives on the night shift, are both first-rate. The brio they bring to their roles isn't surprising -- what actor doesn't want to wear a gun and a badge and swagger around talking with a Chicago accent? -- but they're committed, funny, and believable. And the gunplay — I hope I’m not giving too much away by noting there’s more than a little of it — is visceral and convincing.
Shame about the play, though.
Really, it's more like a skit. There's less going on here than in a typical episode of NYPD Blue even in one of its lame later seasons. Dennis Franz, who emerged as the real star of that long-lived TV show while a parade of better-looking leading men came and went, starred with Joe Mantegna in the original 1976 production of Cops at Chicago's Organic Theatre Company. Later, he had a long run on Hill Street Blues, the celebrated 80s TV police drama on which Fox worked as a story editor. (Fox now blogs for The Huffington Post.)
It's clear from ACT Artistic Director Jack Marshall's program notes that he considers Cops to be a watershed moment in the progression of police drama from the foursquare clarity of Dragnet to the moral vagaries of The Shield. We say: Come on, now. Cops takes the attitude and the wardrobe and the lingo of other, better, police stories, but none of the ideas. None of the hard choices that police work, at least according to its more thorough fictional portrayals, really involves. So little actually happens in this show that even the most threadbare synopsis would constitute major spoilerage, so out of respect to the director and performers, who have done their jobs honorably and well, we'll say only that it’s set in an all-night diner.
PICTURED: Brian Razzino, John Bailey, and Regan Wilson in American Century Theatre's Cops.
Marshall's notes defend the play as groundbreaking in its depiction of "the complex moral conflicts endemic to police work." (He says that an actor announced at the auditions that he thought the play “vile,” and that a frequent ACT patron wrote to protest its selection.) Reading all this, one ends up expecting a different play than the one we get, which simply is neither raw enough nor absorbing enough to warrant the fuss. Meanwhile, the claim that audiences of 1976 were shocked, shocked by the notion that police sometimes break the law themselves seems laughable -- unless you think theater crowds never go to the movies.
Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry and William Friedkin’s The French Connection, both came out within a couple of months of one another at the end of 1971 — half a decade before Cops — and both were huge hits. The French Connection swept that year's Academy Awards, taking home Oscars for best screenplay, direction, editing, Best Actor (for Gene Hackman's performance has the NYPD's "Popeye" Doyle) and Best Picture. Both films gave us scenarios in which their protagonists must choose to serve the letter of the law or their own, possibly flawed, sense of justice. True, they didn't appear to agonize over these decisions -- but their audiences sure were split over whether to cheer their gloves-off methods. You could argue that these pictures glamorized police work, but if they did, they also portrayed it mostly as a thankless, exhausting, lonely, difficult job. Dirty Harry ends with its titular antihero chucking his badge away in frustration. (He apparently changed his mind soon after, as he'd be back on the beat for no less than four sequels -- but not before the disgusted badge-toss became an instant cop-movie cliché, copied in Point Break, among others.)
By the time Fox sat down to write Cops, the world had seen police corruption and/or brutality depicted frankly in movies like Serpico, The Seven-Ups, and 1975's big Oscar-winner, Dog Day Afternoon. All of which is to say that Cops was almost as unremarkable in 1976 as it is in 2008. What meager drama it offers is of the damsel-tied-the-tracks-with-a-train-bearing-down variety -- the tough calls that police really do face simply aren't here.
Again, it’s well-acted and cannily staged, and over quickly enough that you can still catch a movie with your evening if this leaves you starved for drama. But you know what they say about lipstick on a pig.
Cops is at American Century Theatre through Jan. 26. Ticket information is here.