The first time my mother ever googled me, she stumbled on a vitriolic blog post written by a convicted sex offender.
Poor Mom. She’d been “looking for my articles” and instead found an early online troll. While on probation, the sex offender had launched a blog to rail against my former newspaper, which had reported on his massive collection of child pornography. Parole was short-lived: He was caught soliciting sex from minors at a city library, and returned to jail in 2007.
That much I remembered, but I googled him after seeing Downstate, Bruce Norris’ incendiary comedy of conscience. The outstanding play about a halfway house for men who’ve abused minors runs at Studio Theatre through Feb. 16. Turns out, years after I left my Pennsylvanian newspaper, the sex offender who blogged about me was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison after another failed parole.
“Jail isn’t the right place for sex offenders,” one reader commented on a 2014 sentencing story. “The coroner’s office is.” Another suggested putting a bullet between his eyes, to “save the taxpayers money.”
Into this moral tug of war steps Norris, a playwright best known for Clybourne Park, a Pulitzer Prize-winning hit about gentrification in the same Chicago neighborhood where Lorraine Hainsberry set her seminal play A Raisin in the Sun. (Woolly Mammoth presciently mounted an early Clybourne Park staging in 2010—the year before it won the Pulitzer.) Norris has no problem pushing hot buttons, but the challenge with Downstate is convincing audiences they should come see a play about sex offenders and the visitors who ring their doorbell. Because you should. In keeping with the push-pull milieu, Downstate is more revelatory—and even entertaining—than a play about sex offenders perhaps deserves to be.
Parole officers, pot-smoking girlfriends, and survivors from decades past all come knocking at the group home 280 miles downstate from Chicago, hence the play’s title. Alexander Woodward designed the Lutheran Social Services-owned house, complete with crappy carpet and 1970s wood paneling. The opening scene finds Fred (Dan Daily) meeting with Andy (Tim Getman), an abuse survivor, and his wife, Em (Emily Kester), for the first time in about 25 years. From his wheelchair, Fred, a former piano teacher who served 15 years for abusing his students, navigates the awkward situation with more ease than his visitors, who have come to read statements kindled by support groups and decades of pent-up anger.
“One part of the acceptance,” Andy says haltingly, “is to look you in the eye today and say that you are fundamentally evil.”
“Are you sure you don’t want some coffee?” Fred interrupts, “gently” according to the stage directions.
Andy declines, his wife accuses him of “backpedaling,” and finally he reads his childhood mentor a “a fantasy” where he’d “jam the barrel of a gun” down Fred’s throat. Then a housemate arrives with groceries and two others squabble over the bathroom, leaving Andy without the life-changing catharsis he came for.
As Norris gradually makes clear, Fred has reached a state of remorseful equilibrium, balanced during 15 years in prison, where he was physically abused, and another decade or so in transitional housing. Andy, meanwhile, appears to be receiving some questionable advice from his survivors’ group and probably picked the wrong life partner. Sometimes he’d “rather sit in the dark than use the PlayStation” with their young son, Em says, dripping with disapproval.
“Well ya know, I’m not a specialist or anything, but it sounds to me like maybe you’re depressed,” Fred suggests when Andy returns alone later. (Only Daily’s folksy Prairie Province accent mars his sympathetic portrayal.)
The survivors turn out to be the least likeable characters in Downstate. That’s thin ethical ice for Norris and Studio artistic director David Muse, who helms this production. While Getman’s performance could be more nuanced, the worthwhile suggestion remains that survivors of major trauma—sexual or otherwise—will function best when they balance acknowledging past pain with embracing life in the present. That’s an emotional plane Andy has yet to summit.
“These last few years have been a watershed,” he says, perhaps alluding to perpetual revelations about abusive Catholic priests. Downstate premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2018, two years after Spotlight won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. But whereas that film dealt with uncovering the systemic church cover-up, Norris asks us to confront sex offenders who were caught and served their time.
Fred and his housemates fall on various points along the penitence spectrum. Details of the sex crimes each man committed unspool gradually, so that listening for revelations becomes half of the play’s dramatic tension. The plot arc is delivered by visitors to the group home, including an overworked parole office (Kelli Blackwell) and a naive young woman (Irene Hamilton) who works at the local Staples with Fred’s housement Gio (Jaysen Wright).
“It’s entry-level sales associate, but there’s benefits and I see it as a transitional stepping stone out of the service sector into some kinda managerial capacity,” Gio explains, before soliciting business advice from Andy, a personal wealth manager.
Scripture-quoting Gio would be insufferable even if he hadn’t served time for statutory rape (“That girl falsified her records!”) but his unearned confidence provides key comic relief. Former musical theater actor Dee (Stephen Conrad Moore) endears himself to audiences by caring for Fred, picking up Nutter Butter cookies from the IGA and asking if he emptied his colostomy bag yet today. Felix (Richard Ruiz Henry) is the quietest of the bunch, but may soon face consequences for visiting a public library and not checking out books.
Under threat of a polygraph test from the parole office, Felix admits to breaking the terms of his release, although he wasn’t at the library to surf porn sites or solicit children, as the blogging sex offender I dealt with in Pennsylvania did. That would be too simplistic, and while easy to watch, this is not an easy play. Every scene frames a different moral dilemma, and that’s what makes Downstate so remarkable.
Contemporary dark comedies that are funny and full of hard truths are a dime a dozen, but social issue plays that prompt a liberal-leaning theater crowd to reset its moral compass are rare. Regardless of which way you lean at the play’s tragic end, the arrow points to hard problems, and empathy, for everyone onstage.
Downstate, by Bruce Norris and directed by David Muse, runs through Feb. 16 at Studio Theatre. studiotheatre.org. $77–$102, with discount programs available.