American Tragedy
There are some problems in life that go unresolved. Far more challenging, though, are the ones that go unrecognized. We suffer and don’t know why; we try to feel better and have hope for the future, but have no idea where to begin. So we reach for greater understanding of ourselves, one another, and the systems in which we operate. This is why we go to the theater.
In the 5th century BCE, Agamemnon by Aeschylus premiered in Athens. It was the first tragedy in a trilogy, the Oresteia, the plot of which is – strap in – as follows: Agamemnon sentences his daughter to death so that the Greeks can win the war. Then, his wife, Clytemnestra, murders him for having murdered their daughter. Next, their son, Orestes – who has grown up tortured by the fact that his mother killed his father – kills his mother. And, finally, the Furies – three goddesses who represent justice – pursue Orestes for killing his mother, but (in a twist of yet more divine intervention) they do not kill him. There is mercy. And this mercy ends the violent cycle of retribution.
The Oresteia is not a soapy revenge drama. It is Tragedy. With a capital T.
Tragedy is an inquiry into the human condition: our blind spots and fatal flaws, our agony, grief, and despair, our struggle to navigate conflicts when life feels incoherent and reconciliation is impossible. It is an examination of the tortured relationship between forgiveness and vengeance, and between mercy and injustice. It is, in other words, a confrontation with the greatest impasses in ourselves and in society.
Downstate by Bruce Norris is Tragedy.
The play unfolds over the course of 24 hours inside a halfway house where four sex offenders live south of Chicago. The story begins when Andy, an adult survivor, confronts his childhood abuser, Fred. Andy tells Fred, haltingly, why he is – or, more importantly, is not – there:
ANDY: [Y]ou will never be deserving of sympathy, or forgiveness . . . That is not something … I can give you. But I must remember to forgive myself, and remember that I was only a child, and to treat myself with the same respect and loving kindness that any child deserves.
For Andy, there is no amount of apology or reformation that could undo the lifetime of, as Andy puts it, “guilt and shame” which directly resulted from Fred’s abuse. The damage is done. Forgiveness is unavailable, irrelevant, neither Andy’s objective nor the play’s action.
And how cruelly true this is about life, that the conditions which make forgiveness most transformative are the very same which make forgiveness impossible. We suffer at the impasse of irresolution, trapped in the prison of the past, desperate for a countervailing force that can compensate for our personal sense of powerlessness in the face of abuse, and interrupt cycles of hurt. What can answer this calling?
The law, at its best, might. Lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson offers a framework which allows the law to remain separate and apart from the realm of forgiveness, without sacrificing our humanity – even and especially in situations of extraordinary wrong. That framework is what he calls “just mercy.” In his 2014 book of the same title, Stevenson defines the term as a kind of compassionate understanding – which can, sometimes, manifest in policy – which uniquely “belongs to the undeserving.” The purpose behind it, Stevenson argues, is that when we find mercy for people when it seems least warranted or expected, we have the power to “break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering” which plague society.
If we follow Stevenson’s argument, then mercy for sex offenders – some of the most “undeserving” – would not preclude reparation for survivors or accountability for perpetrators. It could, in fact, facilitate resolution on the collective level when it is unavailable on the individual level.
But this is not how America operates.
In a 2019 episode of the podcast, “You’re Wrong About,” hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes analyze America’s treatment of sex offenders. The episode builds on an article Hobbes had just written, for The Huffington Post, called “Sex Offender Registries Don't Keep Kids Safe, But Politicians Keep Expanding Them Anyway,” exposing how the punishment meted out to them is biased, draconian, and ineffectual. I’ll share a few points from Hobbes’s research.
State registries, across the country, restrict sex offenders from living in 99% of homes because they are within 1,000 feet of a school, church, or other place where children spend time. But, of course, this restriction does not actually keep children safe; 1,000 feet is about a five-minute walk, and the law can only regulate where sex offenders live, not where they go. In fact, by increasing the likelihood of homelessness and unemployment, these restrictions make it more probable that sex offenders will end up camping out in restricted areas. And the enforcement of these policies is full of hypocrisy and racism. State registries are disproportionately black and poor, but, when dealing with white billionaire pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein, local prosecutors and judges tend to impose fewer and less severe restrictions.
In study after study, it is clear that this area of public policy is rippling with weaponized dysfunction. It fails to prevent abuse, and, by financially prioritizing its current tactics over resources for survivors, it fails to repair and restore. As Marshall observes: “This idea that we are going to solve the problem by removing the contagion, this is not a contagion-based problem. This is something in the human that we need to figure out how to manage.”
The system, as it is, may seem to satisfy a basic human need to externalize and extinguish the most irredeemable parts of our society, so as to preserve a sense of order in our world and in ourselves. But this shadow-self projection is a fallacy that only serves to amplify the personal sense of failure we feel in the face of abuse as we try to resolve what is unresolvable, to find somewhere to put it all – and realize there is nowhere.
This is not justice. This is the stuff of Tragedy.
In 2015, when we produced The Christians by Lucas Hnath, Adam Greenfield wrote an essay about Tragedy and helplessness. Here is 2015-Adam: “tragedy arises when we become aware of a fissure in the world, a crack or conflict that can never be reconciled. . . . we witness a character who employs his/her complete self to engage in that conflict, only to recognize that it’s the human condition in a universe which will always be beyond our comprehension.”
Downstate is an appeal not for reconciliation, but recognition. It is an autopsy of our broken shared humanity. A plea to witness problems that cannot be solved and people who cannot be redeemed and yet – still, always – can be more fully understood.
Maybe that is a kind of mercy.
