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Ex-Chicago Reader Reporter Dramatizes His Work on Police Torture

By AAN Staff

january 12, 2010 01:17 pm

Ex-Chicago Reader Reporter Dramatizes His Work on Police Torture

John Conroy has turned to the stage to tell the story of police brutality he spent more than a decade covering at the Reader. The two-act "My Kind of Town," Conroy's first effort as a playwright, fictionalizes some of the stories of police torture he encountered in the city. He tells the New York Times that for the play he tried to create characters with moral ambiguities in order to stimulate conversations about the audience members' own feelings on torture. "I'm not a 'gotcha' reporter, and I wasn't out to paint cops in any simplistic good-and-evil way," Conroy says. "And I didn't want to tell a story that said that the guilty cops have to be punished or the righteous have to win, but rather that these were real human beings who had to make choices that we as a society need to see -- and that those choices had consequences that we as a society and city need to deal with."

View full article at The New York Times