SIX CORNERS BACKSTAGE GUIDE 5 I’m absolutely thrilled to have landed the world- premiere of Six Corners at American Blues Theater. More than any other company in town, American Blues embraces and elevates the diverse, blue-collar Chicago theater aesthetic — exactly what is needed for this play. Six Corners is the third in a loose Chicago cop trilogy that began with A Steady Rain, which premiered at Chicago Dramatists and magically landed on Broadway starring Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. A Steady Rain was followed by The Detective’s Wife, which premiered at Writers Theatre. I call these three plays a loose trilogy because I wrote the first drafts all around the same time — also because each takes a known cop genre (buddy cop story, murder mystery, and police procedural) and theatricalizes it. None of the same characters appear in the plays — they are simply (“loosely”) unified by place (Chicago) and subject matter (Chicago cops). (I married into a Chicago cop family, so I heard lots and lots of stories over the years!) It’s a great privilege and an honor to be working with Peter DeFaria and Gary Griffin once again. DeFaria, as many know, co-starred in both the Chicago Dramatists and the Royal George productions of A Steady Rain (with Jeff Award winner Randy Steinmeyer), and Griffin directed the world premiere of The Detective’s Wife (with Jeff Award winner Barbara Robertson). Having the co-star of the first play and the director of the second both working on the third is an accidental poetry that Blues Artistic Director Wendy Whiteside made happen and just seems right — an artistic coup. Six Corners was inspired by a real-life event. One bitterly cold Chicago Christmas years ago, I heard a CTA employee at the Western Avenue el stop get shot — “heard” because I heard the gunshot and the assailant fled just as I reached the top of the eastbound platform. The man who was shot fell down onto the tracks. Weirdly, an eastbound train left the Rockwell station just then and was approaching. Without thinking, I jumped down onto the tracks (near the deadly third rail) and attempted to lift the man onto the platform. He was easily twice my size, so I couldn’t do it alone. There was a lone woman on the platform watching me — I barked at her to stop watching and to give me a hand. She did. We managed to lift the man onto the platform before the train pulled in. We walked him to the warming bench, turned the heat lamp on. The woman and I were covered in blood — the wounded man was drenched in it. While we waited for an ambulance to arrive, I saw the gunshot wound. It was in the side of the CTA employee’s head. He died before the ambulance got there, while we propped him up between us on that bench. The woman and I spent the rest of the evening upstairs at the Belmont and Western police station telling our stories over and over to two exhausted, world-weary homicide detectives. They interviewed us separately, then swapped rooms and interviewed us again. I never learned the name of the CTA employee who died or the name of the woman I shamed into helping him. I did learn, however, that night how dependent our fragile criminal justice system is on storytelling. And that’s why this incident inspired this play. NOTE FROM PLAYWRIGHT KEITH HUFF Playwright Keith Huff Director Gary Griffin