Sometimes a work of fiction lights a fuse and sets off a social movement.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catalyzed opinion in the north against slavery. Among 19th century best-sellers, her book is ranked second only to the Bible.
• Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published in 1915, exposed atrocious conditions for both workers and animals in Chicago’s slaughterhouses and led to federal food safety inspections (if not quite a workers’ revolution Sinclair was angling for).
Fast-forward to today: Downstate is a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright’s drama about men on the sex-offender registry living in a halfway house and fighting to survive as modern-day pariahs. The play, premiered in 2018, won critical acclaim, standing ovations, and extended runs in Chicago, London, and New York, where it closed in early 2023. For more than a generation in the US there’s wide agreement that no punishment goes too far, no degradation unjustified, when it comes to men who’ve committed a sex offense, details be damned. Could Downstate’s success signal potential for a shift in opinion?
Stowe’s and Sinclair’s novels were heavy-handed, filled with stock character-types cut from shiny cardboard, along with scenes of cup-runneth-over bathos, all in service of pile-driving home their authors’ homilies.
On the orders of his heartless master Simon Legree, the novel’s eponymous slave Uncle Tom is beaten to death by overseers. His offense was aiding the escape of a beautiful young slave girl before Legree could rape her. Uncle Tom grants his killers Christian forgiveness as his life ebbs away.
Upton Sinclair shows workers falling into rendering tanks and being ground up together with slaughtered pigs, only to be packed and sold as “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.”
Both books owed their success in part to aiming right for the gut.
In Bruce Norris’s Downstate, the four ex-cons in the dilapidated Chicago halfway house start off as being “types” familiar from innumerable news reports, TV dramas, and daytime talk shows.
Wheelchair-bound Fred, an older white man, is a former piano teacher who came on sexually to a number of his young male students. Now, after years in prison and therapy, he is filled with remorse and resigned to his fate, content to peck out sonatas with quaking hands on an electronic keyboard. One of the former students whom Fred abused is Andy, now a successful banker. Filled with rage, Andy has come to the halfway house with his wife to confront Fred and settle scores.
Two of the other denizens of the group home are Latino, and they are a study in contrasts. Gio, a young, slick, Bible-quoting aspiring entrepreneur whose erstwhile girlfriend, he says, sported a fake ID but turned out to be underage, sending him to prison for statutory rape. As a “one-time offender” Gio exudes bitterness at how his fated is lumped together with “these hardcore pederastic motherfuckers.” Felix is devoutly religious, and gives off airs of desperation. He was found guilty of a sexual offense against his own daughter.
The play’s muse is Dee, a queeny black ex-actor who spent years in prison for a relationship with a 14-year-old fellow cast-member on a traveling troupe performing Peter Pan and comments on his situation and his housemates with acid wit.
On “Oprah” or “Law and Order: SVU” nothing these men could have to say for themselves would hold any credence, either for establishing their humanity or detracting from what would be cast as their monstrosity. Corralled in their halfway house, they live like feral animals, well-caged. The play opens with the announcement of new, more tightly arrayed bars on their cage: a new city zoning ordinance expands the distance away from schools offenders must not pass means the men are cut off from the only city bus they can catch and their only supermarket. In mainstream media portrayals, such details raise the question: Why were are these fiends ever let be let out on the streets in the first place?
Playwright Bruce Norris won a Pulitzer in drama for his 2010 Clybourne Park, which deftly explores the intersections of race and real estate – and bias and bigotry – over two generations in a Chicago neighborhood. In Downstate, Norris pushes beyond two-dimensional stereotypes of men with a sex offense in their past, putting the audience in the position of a diner who thought he was going to tuck into a juicy steak, only to find it larded with nails and shards of glass, obstructing anything but the most careful eating.
Fred is in a wheelchair after having his spine smashed in an attack he suffered in prison by an inmate outraged at Fred’s crime. With Job-like equanimity, Fred takes his situation in stride, ever apologetic and cheerfully self-effacing. He remembers in detail Andy’s quick progress mastering piece by Chopin, Fred’s sense of himself as a teacher still key to his identity. Slyly, the narrative lets it drop that another boy Fred approached sexually is gay and evidently successful, living with his husband in Paris, not seemingly devastated by trauma or anger as Andy is.
More unexpected wrinkles unfold. Felix’s family ties, including with his daughter, remain strong, suggesting that, even if society hasn’t forgiven him for what he did, his family has. Felix risks his freedom – indeed his life – trying to send his daughter a birthday present and visit his sister dying of cancer in Texas. Ex-actor Dee’s teenage victim, it turns out, remained close to him, writing weekly letters while Dee was in prison. And Andy’s rage and sense of damage is suggested to be over the top so that he is shown to be ending up imagining abuses that, the playwright suggests, could not have happened.
Artists attend not only to content but form. And getting the right form – in this case, narrative structure and dialogue that flows naturally while expressing the essential, often unstated, feelings and concepts driving common views – has the curious power to shift emotions, and in turn convey ideas that, at limits that Downstate touches, are hard to get across any other way. Which is just to state the obvious: art can reach places other kinds of expression can’t.
Downstate succeeds in unsettling comfortable nostrums, at least judging by reviews in venues that normally make fomenting rage against sex offenders an editorial staple.
Downstate won accolades from mainstream reviewers from the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, New York Post, and was a New York Times “critic’s pick”.
“Shocking, controversial Downstate is the season’s best play so far,” was the New York Post headline to a review by Johnny Oleksinski. “Norris has written a complex and compassionate play, but not a preachy or judgmental one. The audience is never pushed to forgive or condemn, but rather to evaluate. Some past events we learn about are clear-cut horrific, while others are more layered. The punishment, to these characters’ fury, is equal.”
“Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play, Downstate: that the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane. Are you still reading?” began the review by Washington Post chief drama critic Peter Marks in a November 23rd, 2022, review. Norris “is questioning what degree of compassion should society fairly hold out to those who have served their time for sexual abuse, assault or rape,” Marks continues. “[T]he predators who’ve completed their prison terms are depicted not as monsters but rather as complicated, troubled souls.”
“Downstate wants to make you sit in discomfort as long as possible and see what lies on the other side,” wrote New York magazine critic Jackson McHenry. “Imagine these men’s lives, what they talk about, where the law tells them they can and can’t go to get groceries. Dip your toe into empathy, but careful: The water’s boiling.”
New York’s theater press also chimed in with praise. “In a time of brittle orthodoxy on the left and hyperventilating rhetoric about groomers on the right, Downstate has something to offend everyone,” wrote Zachary Stewart in a piece titled “Downstate Offers Sympathy for Sex Offenders and Scrutiny for Victims” on the site Theatermania.com. “Norris takes aim at the hypocrisy of a society that claims to value redemption but makes it impossible for all but the very rich. He also skewers a culture that evangelizes bodily autonomy and consent while endorsing the most brutally coercive tactics of the state …. All of that makes Downstate the must-see play of the fall. It powerfully reclaims the stage as a home for dangerous ideas, a place where the thoughts we would rather ignore confront us — not with startling moral clarity, but sublime doubt.”
Decades of research show how sex-offender registries and residency restrictions upend lives and – the injustice of never-ending punishment aside – “don’t work” to make any child safer. This has convinced most experts these laws are a disaster. But communicating that message to a wider public hasn’t so far gained traction. Bruce Norris’s Downstate is one of the first indications of the next thing that must happen if a social movement is to be sparked: the engagement of those with the skill who communicate across the gamut that runs from the heart to the mind. Norris has illuminated a path forward for artists wanting to engage one of America’s greatest hidden injustices.
Peculiari Crimen 