Monday 28 November 2022 05:02 PM Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Bruce Norris' Downstate DEFENDS pedophiles, ... trends now
Reviews are in for Downstate, a play that questions the societal punishment inflicted upon post-incarceration pedophiles, and they are positive.
The play, written by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Bruce Norris, is currently running off-Broadway after premiering at Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre pre-pandemic in 2018.
The piece centers on a group down in downstate Illinois, at which a group of four men, each a registered sex offender who abused at least one child, live menial existences.
According to a large handful of reviews from the nation's top outlets, the work is an uncomfortable triumph by Norris that 'wants to make you sit in discomfort as long as possible and see what lies on the other side,' according to Jackson McHenry of New York Magazine and Vulture.
Washington Post's chief theatre critic Peter Marks called the play ‘brilliant’, writing: ‘[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.'
In the review, Marks says the award-winning playwright toys with the position that believes ‘the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane.’
Downstate - a play by Bruce Norris about four convicted pedophiles living together in Illinois. The show is currently running Off-Broadway
The play revolves around a central theme of mercy for formerly incarcerated sex offenders who are living out their days in a rundown group home, working menial jobs
Norris, posed here with a Tony award for his play Clybourne Park, also won a Pulitzer Prize for the play that confronts themes of race relations and gentrification in Chicago
Critics from the journals that cater to the country's elite theatre-going population were careful to mask plaudits for the complex work in language that largely avoids straightforward praise for the controversial stage work.
Peter Marks of the Washington Post wrote that upon learning the details of the crime that each felon has committed, 'we are in effect asked to judge
