After a heart attack has him knocking on death’s door, retired New York police officer Walter “Pops” Washington decides to give the son with whom he’s had a fraught relationship some advice.
Be sure to get your fiber and potassium, he tells Junior. And while tap water doesn’t have the cache of designer drinks, it’s perfectly fine.
OK, what Walter has to offer may not seem all that profound as end-of-life wisdom goes. But the glib bit helps take the edges off the hard stuff in “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play that’s now up in a visceral production at Park Square Theatre.
As Pops, Emil Herrera is brusque, stoic and sweet, sometimes all at once. His performance in the lead role anchors the production in an unblinking ferocity and helps to reveal the complicated humanity of someone who once wore the badge.
Pops spent three decades on the New York police force, which means that he has absorbed 30 years’ worth of traumas. He retired not because he had come to a nice round service number, but because a uniformed rookie fellow officer shot him six times when he was off duty at a shady establishment.
Pops is Black and the shooter is white. While this story touches on race and gender among other things, it’s really about an officer grappling with how to leech out the years of pain he’s absorbed and the feeling of betrayal he now has because of how his department treated him.
Director Stephen DiMenna’s staging meets the poetry of Guirgis’ potent script with punchiness of its own. Taking place in three chockablock rooms of a New York apartment designed by Benjamin Olsen, “Crazy” is expertly acted with keening performances that match the emotional pitch of Fred Kennedy’s gutbucket soul score.
Herrera is totally engaging as Pops, who, at one point, clasps a Jack Daniels bottle the way he used to hug his late wife, and does a slow dance. Pops may be tempestuous and gruff, but beneath that exterior is a survivor seeking and giving grace.
