Displaying items by tag: Bruce Norris

“Downstate” is a bit of a dog whistle for Chicagoland, suggesting a cultural distinction between urbanites in the north, and the vast agrarian expanses to the south – downstate - where trash goes, sewage flows, and where the state government builds prisons.

The word becomes generalized in Downstate, a new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris, which looks at the fraught issue of finding housing for convicted pedophiles after they serve time for their crimes. During parole, these men are returned to the” community,” but not to their home.

Instead they live in halfway houses operated by non-profits, sited in carefully proscribed areas that must be so-many hundreds of feet away from schools and other areas children may gather. The inhabitants are not allowed to go online, or possess a smartphone, keep alcohol, use Facebook, or move about freely.

Norris takes the less politically correct position of empathy in showing the suffering imposed on these pariahs, who in the world of #MeToo are unlikely to get a second thought. They are subject to regular inquisitions by parole officers, and a concatenation of rules and restrictions means there are few locations for them to live in such transitional halfway houses. So, they are shipped Downstate.

“I started doing a lot of reading about the things paroled sex offenders increasingly face– registries, residency restrictions, neighborhood watches, self-appointed vigilante groups,” says Norris. “These are post-incarceration punishments, that don’t exist for any other category of criminal.”

That in a nutshell is what Downstate is about: four men holed up in a house run by a Lutheran social service agency. They can go to work and come home, and that’s about it – even the local IGA grocery store is only 2,450 feet from the elementary school. They are indeed strange bedfellows, and Norris gives us the nuance of the caliber of their individual violations:

• the piano teacher Fred (Steppenwolf stalwart Francis Guinan) who had sex with two adolescent male students. Guinan, in an understated performance, shows the range that can be expressed within a very constrained character.

• Gio (Glenn Davis in an amazing, hyperbolic performance) a frenetic man on the make with a plan in his hand, whose crime was considered Category 1 (lower level) statutory rape of a young woman below age.

• Felix (Eddie Torres) who was convicted of incest with his daughter. Torres conveys the abject suffering and torment as he loses access to his family.

• A Broadway choreographer and accomplished promoter and musical artist, Dee, who fell in love with a 14-year-old boy in a road show of Peter Pan.

As Dee, K. Todd Freeman gives what will certainly become a definitive expression to the role. He is the settled voice of reason and a nurturant center of gravity within this ad hoc family of men, shopping for them and helping to make a home for them. As audience, we listen to Dee: he dishes and gives back as good as he gets – and he becomes our guide and the closest thing to a voice of reason.

Norris may be toying with us, then, by making Dee a very sympathetic character, while at the same time making him an unrepentant advocate for man-boy love – the movement that sees adult male love of minor boys as a victimless crime, and which advocates for release of those convicted of it. 

“There’s not many cases of death by blowjob!” Dee asserts. Gio, for one, abhors Dee both for his gayness and for his pederasty, with some violent outbursts in the house as a result.

Norris focuses this tension with the introduction of Andy (Tim Hopper), a Northshore suburbanite who with his wife Em (Matilda Ziegler) comes to visit Fred to seek redress, to “process” the issue and obtain formal emotional closure by getting him to sign an explicit statement acknowledging his wrongs. Norris contrasts Andy’s suffering with the experience of Dee, who comes to the defense of Fred, while revealing that he, too, was abused as a child – and claims to be none the worse for it. Fred and Em bring all the conventional middle class psychological expression to their claims - but framed within the context of Downstate, it begins to sound more like "white people's problems." 

Norris seems fearless in treading into such troublemaker territory. His Pulitzer winning Clybourn Park visited historic efforts in 1959 to block African Americans from moving into a white Chicago neighborhood, then returned 50 years later to watch a reversal of prejudice as whites tried to gentrify the same now-black area. Downstate will test its audience even further, since pedophiles are largely today's lepers.

Downstate is directed by Pam MacKinnon, and she had her hands full to balance the energy emanating from this remarkable company of performers. A call out to Cecilia Noble as parole officer Ivy - it's almost a thankless role to play the character who has a thankless job, in a play like this. But thank you, Ivy, for very good performance. 

Of particular note, the production is a joint effort by Steppenwolf and the National Theatre of the U.K. It may surprise you to learn the cast is transatlantic. The flawless, broad, working class accent of extreme south suburban Effie (played by Aimee Lou Wood, a Manchester, England native) and the dulcet Kenilworth articulation of Em (played by Londoner Matilda Ziegler) were learned right here on Halsted street, under the tutelage of Gigi Buffington.

Downstate plays through November 18 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. After that it moves to the National Theatre London in January 2019.

Bruce Norris, also a member of the Steppenwolf ensemble, wrote and directed this very funny, fast moving play about a gynecologist turned politician, Bill Pulver, who ends up putting a young prostitute into a coma during rough sex play. 

The play opens at a press conference as the news hits the public about the young woman struggling for life on a respirator where it is also noted  with disgust that she was wearing a child's school uniform when found - much like Pulver’s uniforms his own two young daughters wear to school.

As the play goes on, we find out this is not a one-time event, and in fact it is slowly revealed that he has been seeing various prostitutes for over a decade and has spent more than $76,000.00 of he and his wife's money on his “hobby”, or “sex addiction” which is never made clear. 

I really enjoyed that the female characters far outnumbered the male characters in this play. It gave each of the leads especially Mary Beth Fisher, who plays Pulver’s wife Judy the chance to really tear up the stage with some fantastic speeches. 

Steppenwolf favorite Tom Irwin in the lead as Pulver is perfect as the slightly charismatic, Bill Clinton-ish character who thinks he has no reason to say he's sorry to the public or anyone else. Pulver feels that cheating on his wife with a prostitute is not an ongoing affair, but rather a victim-less crime and a necessity for any man who has been married as long as he has. Pulver refuses to apologize to the public at the press conference and seems to think what he has done is as common as using porn anonymously on the internet except that the porn actually comes to you and has sex with you. 

The couple has a preteen daughter they adopted from Asia who shows a slideshow throughout the play describing how different species of animals have much more dominant females than humans do. Some that do not even require a male to reproduce. Cassidy was who was played sensitively by Emily Chang is literally sickened by the arguing going on around her, grabbing her inhaler and running offstage which neither parent seems to notice or really care about. 

For the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliantly written, witty, almost manifesto-like feminist play. Refreshing is that Norris is not afraid to bring to the surface such taboo subject matter, for instance when the older daughter brings up how upset she is and genuinely concerned with issues like female genital mutilation, a desperately important and horrific feminist and human rights desecration I did not even know existed when I was a teenager.

But then completely disappointing is when Norris writes a final scene where the victim awakens from her coma and seems to be seeking publicity for a book about her injuries. This scene seemed to turn everything around as if it was her fault or intent in some way to capitalize on his crime and shows the husband and wife on opposite sides of the stage breathing a sigh of relief, almost as if to say that if she's not “dead”, and wants some retribution, she probably is a just a whore who "asked for it”, and he is just a regular cheating husband just like any other husband except that he wanted to hold public office while continuing to cheat on his wife with prostitutes. It was almost as if Pulver should be absolved of his wrong doing and may actually even become the victim when the rest of the play, up until that point, steered us otherwise.

I know some men will be aggravated watching this play but intrigued while women will just love it. In fact, there was a gentleman sitting next to me who stated in the after play discussion, "His wife is such a shrew, I think he had a right to cheat on her." I quickly asked, "Even if that's true, did he have the right to lie to her for a decade? To expose her to any number of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS without her knowledge?" The man fell silent and could not answer me, but I suspect he and his wife had quite a rousing discussion on their ride home! 

Funny, smart and dark, running 2 hours and 15 minutes with one intermission, "Domesticated" is exciting to watch, full of great performances and highly recommended. “Domesticated” will get you and your partner  talking - and maybe in the process even fuel a few long overdue divorces of its own.

“Domesticated” is playing at Steppenwolf Theatre through February 7th. For more show information visit www.steppenwolf.org.