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“A Pretty Radical Amount of Compassion”: Playwright Bruce Norris and DOWNSTATE

“A Pretty Radical Amount of Compassion”: Playwright Bruce Norris and DOWNSTATE
Stephen Conrad Moore and Dan Daily. Photo by DJ Corey Photography.
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Bruce Norris is an American actor and playwright who, in his own words, “owns a very attractive glass paperweight with the profile of Joseph Pulitzer etched into it.” He earned this particular knick-knack—a Pulitzer Prize for Drama—for his 2010 play, Clybourne Park, a provocative comedy about race, class, and real estate inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. It also won the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Tony Award for Best Play, the only play to date to win all three.

“Bruce has always been a person who is engaged, and interrogates very deeply how to be in the world,” said Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, to Chicago Magazine. “He’s suspicious of received truths.”

That drive to challenge both ideas and audiences is very much on display in Norris’s play, Downstate, currently on stage at Studio Theatre. The play takes place at a group home for registered sex offenders, where four men are living with the realities of post-incarcerated life. When a man shows up to confront the piano teacher convicted of abusing him as a child, events begin to build to an explosive conclusion.

Richard Ruiz Henry and Kelli Blackwell. Photo by DJ Corey Photography.

In an interview about the play with Steppenwolf in 2018, Norris said, “…the thought occurred to me—how do we tamp down our retaliatory, visceral responses to these people we so easily despise? After all, pedophiles have to go on with their lives somehow, somewhere, right? And, I thought, to simply observe them going about their lives, living with the consequences of what they’ve done…that would require a pretty radical amount of compassion on the part of an audience.”

While Norris is quick to downplay the notion that a play can “change the world,” his work does ask his audience members to take a hard look at themselves and their society. And then, if we don’t like what we see, his plays push us not to stay quiet about it.

Downstate is now playing at Studio Theatre until February 16. Tickets are available at studiotheatre.org.

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