An American Tragedy

The bone-chilling humanity of Bruce Norris's Downstate

Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman in Bruce Norris’s Downstate at Playwrights Horizons

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In my last post I made reference to a show I saw that was a highlight of my theatrical year: Bruce’s Norris’s extraordinary play, Downstate, which runs through January 7th at Playwrights Horizons. I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance to write about it before it closed, but I’m going to take the time to do it now in the hopes that it will encourage someone among my readers to go see it while there is still time. Spoilers galore follow; if you decide not to read this because you don’t want it spoiled, you are morally obligated to actually go and see it.

Downstate is a drama set in a group home for sex offenders somewhere in downstate Illinois. Four men share the small home. The first one we meet is Fred (Francis Guinan), an apparently gentle old man in a wheelchair who, when we first encounter him, is being confronted by his now-grown victim, Andy (Brian Hutchison) who he molested when Andy was twelve and taking piano lessons from him, and Andy’s wife, Em (Sally Murphy), who is there for moral support. The confrontation is supposed to be about closure; Andy is going to read a prepared statement of all the harm Fred has done him, and then Fred is supposed to acknowledge his culpability and sign the statement.

Unfortunately (for Andy), they keep getting interrupted as other members of the makeshift household come through: Dee (K. Todd Freeman), who has been shopping for the household; the motormouthed Gio (Glenn Davis) who is dissatisfied with what Dee has bought for him; and the taciturn and religious Felix (Eddie Torres), who only comes out to get his cereal and then immediately returns to his room without speaking. The disruptions eventually get the best of Andy, and he gives up and leaves without getting the closure (or the signature) he sought.

Over the course of the rest of Act I, we get to know each of these men a bit: what they did, how they were punished, and how they live now. Much of this comes out in interactions with their parole officer, Ivy (Susanna Guzmán), who pays them a scheduled visit after Andy and Em leave. Gio is there for a statutory offense, which he finds barely worth consideration as a crime—after all, he says, the girl misrepresented her age to him. He’s utterly unrepentant. Dee is equally unrepentant though Gio’s total opposite in personality. He’s guilty of a two-year relationship with a fourteen year old boy who was a performer in a traveling show that Dee choreographed when he was in his mid 30s. The affair took place in the late 1980s, and Dee spent fifteen years in prison for the offense. The boy died, some years after, one presumes of AIDS, as so many male dancers tragically did in that era, and which Dee feels as the loss of his truest love. Felix initially seems to be the only one to feel true guilt for his crime. But his is also the most unapproachable for the audience, the most horrible to contemplate: he molested his own daughter.

I recoiled from the revelation, even though I saw it coming. It comes not from Felix’s mouth but from that of his parole officer, who has caught him violating the terms of his parole by going to a library, going on the internet, and trying to make contact with his daughter—all of which Felix tries to hide and cover up with lies before Ivy makes it clear that she already has the goods on him. It’s then, when Felix protests, crying, that he loves his daughter and wanted to wish her a happy birthday (she’s turning fifteen), that Ivy throws in his face: well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it. Because he violated his parole, he’ll be sent back to prison, which Felix declares, bitterly, he won’t do.

The above description probably makes the play sound very schematic and expository. It’s anything but. Norris does a masterful job of creating dramatic conflicts through which the revelation of information feels entirely natural and in character. It also makes the play sound very heavy. It is heavy—but, weird as this might sound, it’s also very funny. The narcissistic and oblivious Gio is an inherently humorous character, and Dee (a character based on people Norris knew in his youth when he was a child actor) has a ready wit that he wields like a stiletto, but Norris also wrings considerable humor from Andy’s misguided quest, which he does without ever minimizing Andy’s entirely real suffering.

Norris knows that laughter is, ultimately, a response to pain, and he uses laughter to enable us to approach these men as human beings, who we know are human beings because they are suffering. When Felix’s crime was revealed, I recoiled from it—but he did too. So I also felt Felix’s pain, the pain of loss as well as humiliation, and I could comprehend the strategies he uses—the perpetual lies and deceit—as ways for him to avoid a real confrontation with what he had done, with who he is. They’re strategies of avoidance and enabling, but they’re also strategies of survival, and if their time has run out then so has Felix’s. There’s only one way for him to escape going back to prison, which is also the only way to escape himself.

All of these men use similar strategies to lie themselves into staying alive. Dee believes he had a genuinely mutual and loving relationship with that teen, and he tells himself (and his parole officer) stories about other cultures where men “mentor” boys sexually. He doesn’t ask himself whether the boy’s subsequent sexual career had anything to do with the kind of mentoring he provided. (This is not a comment on the fact that it was a gay relationship; make him an underage girl and you have a scenario akin to the one in The Tale.) I’m not saying Dee should bear the guilt of the boy’s death; I’m saying he should feel the guilt, and the fact that he loudly denies any such feeling is telling.

And then there’s poor harmless Fred, who really does look like he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but who quite plainly cannot comprehend, on an emotional level, why Andy is there. But then again, does Andy know why he is there? A key moment toward the end of Act I is when the parole officer finds a forbidden smart phone in the house. (The residents are not allowed access to the internet, lest they reoffend on line.) It turns out it’s Andy’s phone, and Andy comes back for Act II to retrieve it—without telling his wife that he’s doing so (he tells her he’s at a sports bar). He tries to confront Fred again, to finish what he started, and as Andy gets frustrated that Fred won’t follow the script Dee tries to get him to leave. But Andy won’t leave. He clearly has unfinished business—but what is it? After quite a bit of back-and-forth, Andy breaks down crying, saying to Fred that Fred never really was his friend, never really cared about him. And Fred, in his gentle voice, says: I was your friend. I still am. And he puts his arm on Andy’s shoulder.

I almost jumped out of my seat at that moment. My every nerve stood on end. This, I thought, is what happened then. What Andy “wants” is to go back to the scene of the crime, to recreate the situation in which he was victimized; it exerts a powerful psychological pull on him that he can’t resist. This is a very common theme with victims of abuse, and Fred, sweet harmless Fred, is ready to go right back to that scene with him, because he is also still the same person, also still someone who cannot understand what is going on except as an opportunity to play a certain role that he gets gratification from. It’s horrifying, and it’s a testament to the depth of Fred’s lack of true empathy, his inability to understand another person as anything but an extension of himself. He can be sweet, and considerate—and he didn’t seduce Andy into coming to see him, or into coming back; those were choices Andy made for himself. But he cannot be Andy’s friend. He should surely know that, if he’s capable of knowing anything about what he did. And he just doesn’t.

And neither does Dee, who sees all this and, when Andy starts to leave without his phone again, accuses him of setting up another opportunity for a visit, remarking crudely on what an expert fellatist Fred must have been for Andy to keep coming back for more. That’s the line that precipitates the violence with which the play climaxes, and it’s a perfect synecdoche for Dee’s mentality. Dee is the caretaker of the bunch, doing the shopping and keeping things orderly and doting in his concern for Fred—and he is acutely attuned to what is going on with the people around him, what they are lying about, what power games they are playing, what they are really after. But he is utterly incapable of empathizing with their behavior as born of suffering. That privilege he reserves for himself.

But it’s also a privilege that Andy and Em reserve for themselves. What is most productively provocative about the play is the suggestion of a parallelism there, that Andy’s and Em’s desire to make Fred and his ilk suffer is at root akin to Fred’s inability to truly comprehend his role in causing suffering. The extraordinary achievement of Downstate is that it is fully honest about these men, about what they did and what that means about who they are—and that nonetheless it sees them as fully human, as beings who suffer. And then it goes further, and forces us to see ourselves as their kin not just as fellow suffering beings but as fellow beings who cause suffering, and who don’t care because that suffering of another is giving us what we need.

Downstate offers no solutions for these men, no solutions for the people they victimized, and no solutions for us in the audience. It is not, in that sense, a play about a social problem. Rather, it’s a tragedy in the true Greek sense, showing us something fundamentally inescapable and terrible about the human condition, the only balm (though not a cure) for which is the experience of pity and terror at recognition of ourselves that theater can provide.

I can’t think of any medicine our culture needs more than that.