Behind the Barrier

By Dinah Zeiger

Sidebar to "Telling Tales and Connecting Communities" which appeared in Inside Arts, The Journal of The Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Nov/Dec 1999.

One effect of communities telling their own stories is to separate fact from fiction. It was clearly evident in the "small portrait" devised by the ASU Department of Public Safety, the campus cops.

Behind the Barrier presented them in what many would consider their natural environment - a crime scene. Led down the spiraling loading ramp outside the stage door, the audience was confronted with a barricade of yellow tape and the flashing lights of a police car and told to disperse. The intercession of a "good cop" finally allowed access backstage, where five police officers who had worked with Roadside Theater offered a small slice-of-life drama drawn from events in their lives.

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cringe when Officer Erin Hansen, straight and trim in her uniform, blonde hair neatly braided, recounted what was running through her mind while a man she had just arrested tried to flirt with her. Good training carries her through most such encounter, but withstanding her mother's warnings about the dangers of being a cop ('You'll lose your femininity and no one will marry you') unleashed a range of emotions familiar to women who defy conventional ideas.

Officer Ray Estrada's harrowing first night on the job involved a naked man, a gun and lots of blood. "Please don't let me be the one to see this guy," he remembered thinking when the call came in, but he was fated to do just that. His candidly revealed responses to the situation weren't the ones that had been drilled into him during training and could have led to something worse than a suspect who had plunged through a glass door, covering himself in blood.

"Looking back, I'd have done differently.I wouldn't have gone for my gun," Estrada said. "If I'd shot him, my career would have ended that first night out."

"Cop stuff" is compelling, admits Sergeant Richard Wilson, who wrote and performed in the play, but that's because it's glamorized. "There's an adage that police work is 95 percent boredom and 5 percent pure adrenaline. And what people get vicariously [in the media] is that 5 percent pure adrenaline," he said. "They're not writing the police report; they're not sitting on a surveillance crossing their legs for four hours because they can't get out of the car. The mundane, repetitive, boring stuff doesn't make for good copy or good entertainment."

For Wilson, participating in the festival afforded an opportunity to get behind the Ray-Bans and the body language of the cop image. "We're a very closed culture," he said, and the play was a way of exposing their feeling, of getting at least the one-way communication going. Wilson called it reverse sensitivity training.

"We get to give them [feelings] back and say what it's like to be on this side of the fence. Those assumptions that [outsiders] make about us either aren't valid or what they're saying is a result of the way we have to do business," he said. "The officers get to show what's behind that façade and what they're thinking, what they're feeling, both in a practical sense and then in a human sense of the aftermath."

The stories told by Wilson and the four other officers were an attempt to contextualize their often unpalatable jobs. "What people see when they drive by an accident scene or what they feel when they're inconvenienced by police officers or what they read in the paper is always a snapshot [to which] they assign their values," he said. "What I found compelling about the project was the opportunity to get the officers' perspective of those situations to a public that only sees it in the Sunday paper, or only sees it on TV or has only seen it when they got that ticket."

What came through in their stories were the compassion and fear, as well as the cynicism, pride and helplessness that are often part of their daily experience on the job. "We're not going to trust anybody else to tell the story," Wilson said. "We've already known they'll get it wrong."

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