NIGHTSIDE
To be fair, Reed doesn’t just want to depict the dead-of-night tedium of a police beat; he aims to prove that in Journalism as much as in Greek tragedy, what goes around comes around. But to do that he’s concocted characters every bit as obvious as the lesson they teach and as black and white, literally, as their conflicts. The odd-couple news hounds are Leonard Cauley, a cocky, eager-beaver black reporter from South Shore who’s fresh out of J school and free-lancing for the Daily Herald. His colleague (at a time when Chicago had five dailies, this pressroom has two reporters) is Bernie Spirko, a hard-bitten, arrogantly cynical white reporter for the Tribune.
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Unfortunately, Reed doesn’t make us care much for either journalist. Spirko is never so detestable that his sinking further satisfies. His latent racism is evaded, not explored; he mutters something about quotas, and that’s that. His cheating is strictly by-the-numbers, nothing like the glorious shenanigans in The Front Page. And when Cauley resorts to using Spirko’s own dirty tricks, he too forfeits our sympathy; we never feel that he had no other choice, even if it’s a precedent that Cauley doesn’t intend to follow.
Like everything else here, Spirko’s been done before and better (by, for instance, Houston in Goodman Theatre’s The Front Page and Organic’s Kiss It Goodbye). Still, you can’t blame actors for failing to resuscitate unnewsworthy stereotypes.
