Downstate

“Bruce Norris’s “Downstate” is the kind of play that takes over your body gradually. Its tension seeps into your limbs, settles tautly in your solar plexus and does not leave. Out on the street after the performance, your every synapse remains on high alert.”

“'Downstate' is in no way a paean to pedophilia, but it prompts us to examine our vengeance, and that’s a lot to ask. It is touching in ways that make us uncomfortable to be touched...Brace yourself, and see it.”

“'Downstate' wants to make you sit in discomfort as long as possible and see what lies on the other side.”

“Engaged viewers may find themselves feeling that their moral compass has gone haywire...it’s not the violent denouement that is likely to remain with you, but the infinite shades of gray that Mr. Norris infuses into the play.”

“Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play...'Downstate' is proof positive that you can love a play that turns you inside out.”

“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.”

“'Downstate' is a difficult play about difficult subject matter...but the play seeks to do something different, more complicated and morally challenging.”

“Norris’ smart and effective script is packed with controversy; its characters are stained by the trauma in which their lives have been steeped, and it’s uncertain they will ever feel clean again. So many questions come to mind as this play unfolds. ... "Downstate" is a stirring, thought-provoking play about a deeply painful topic that plagues societies around the world. It’s an extremely tight piece of writing; every word and action is relevant. I can’t wait to see it again.”

“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.”

“'Downstate' isn't a political treatise. It's a character study, with social comment artfully woven in. And it's graced with one of the most skillful ensembles you've seen in many a season.”

“Perhaps some patrons leaving 'Downstate' will be thinking they’ve just been exposed to an unexpectedly controversial public service announcement – to an unusually tough-minded PSA. Truth to tell, they have been, and Norris is to be admired for programing it.”

“'Downstate' made me angry. It also made me think. Not that pedophiles deserve some kind of blanket redemption arc: that would be too laughably simple for Norris.”

“Bruce Norris manages to find moments of comedy in this play about four men, formerly imprisoned for sex crimes against minors, who live in a group home not far from Chicago, in downstate Illinois. It’s part of his larger project, aided by a superb cast and fine direction by Pam MacKinnon, to change the audience’s perspective about people viewed universally as repugnant.”

“Norris not only knows how to construct a play, he also knows how to write a devastating one-liner, and the one he gives Ivy to eviscerate Felix’s life story is a nuclear.”

“Even the most hair-raising of [Norris’] works pales in comparison to Downstate. Taking direct and deadly aim at one of society's bedrock pieties, he builds his latest drama around the residents of a group home for sex offenders, a gambit certain to ride the audience's nerves to the breaking point. Then he surrounds this household of parolees with interlopers who, if anything, may be even less sympathetic. It's a blackly comic tour of humanity's fallen state, posing questions likely to keep you sleep-deprived. And yet, despite its grotesque subject and appalling cast of characters, it is savagely, uncompromisingly alive.”

“Mr. Norris...can’t quite avoid a few of the pitfalls of conventional well-made playwriting, and not everything rings completely true. Regardless, Downstate, staged with knockout power by Pam McKinnon, is a sturdily written, sensitively handled, exceptionally well-acted, and thoroughly engrossing confrontation with an unpleasant subject from which it’s difficult to divert your eyes.”

“So many questions, with such difficult answers. 'Downstate' begs us not to avoid them. I beg you not to avoid this remarkable work and production!”