A jury finally managed to convict former Chicago PD detective Jon Burge of perjury and obstruction of justice in January of 2011, nearly twenty years after he was fired from the force for using torture. Now he’s whiling away the next three-plus years in federal prison, an unpleasant place, certainly, but one slightly more welcoming than Death Row, which is where a good number of the young men that Burge and his men tortured in the late 70s and early 80s wound up. As a result of all this malfeasance, things were muddled enough that outgoing Gov. George Ryan in 2003 flung his hands in the air and emptied Illinois’ Death Row completely; the state has since outlawed capital punishment. So maybe some good does, eventually, come out of bleak horror, but what a grinding and unpleasant path to take. John Conroy’s new play My Kind of Town, which TimeLine Theatre has up in a world premiere staging through July 29th, filters the entire scandal through one character and asks, in the process, some painful questions about torture and the limits of humanity. (FULL ARTICLE: Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times)