Notes on Downstate, from the Artistic Director
For some reason, when I was twelve, I found myself in the audience of the West Coast premiere of Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon. If you aren't familiar with this play, it's a seminal work that circles around the banality of evil -- and it's not exactly meant for twelve-year-olds. I recall acute discomfort in the air, and the shock and anger it provoked from the audience, many of whom walked out mid-performance. I recall feeling confused and scared by the response. I often wonder if this was the moment I became hooked on theater.
Actors (L-R) Kathryn Pogson & Linda Hunt in the Off-Broadway play "Aunt Dan & Lemon." (New York). Photo by Martha Swope.
(A year after sitting in that audience, I campaigned unsuccessfully for Aunt Dan and Lemon to replace Pippin as my middle school’s fall show.)
In his essay “Morality,” which Shawn wrote to accompany the 1994 publication of this play, he frames Aunt Dan and Lemon as an inquiry of how we -- as civilized, awake individuals in society -- manage to justify cruelty. As characters in his play casually deny instincts such as compassion and mercy, in support of fascism, Shawn the playwright, speaking as himself in his essay, dissects how they’ve come to believe what they believe. He writes, “If we decide we don’t need to see all people as equally real, and we come to believe that we ourselves and the groups we belong to are more real, we of course are making a factual mistake.”
It’s an idea of morality that has stuck with me over time, that for one seeking to live a moral life, the ultimate aim is to see all people as equally real.
But is that possible? If we could genuinely see all people with the same complexity that we see in ourselves – the same degree of “realness” – how could we not find compassion for them? Not “them” collectively, but as individuals. And then if we could, how would we conduct our lives accordingly, in this city, in this country? Would we be consumed by endless horrors and injustices? Would we be fighting in Ukraine? Would we give away our possessions? Our work would be endless. Could we ever sleep?
I do sleep, though, and am able to go about my day as a guy in America, lost in my own swirling complexity, the protagonist in an ensemble of others doing the same. And I feel comforted by that, my guilt alleviated. It allows me to proceed, to quiet my thinking and do my work. I put on my headphones and focus on the smaller ways I might do some good.
I’m of the mind that one of theater’s jobs – or, at least, one of non-profit theater’s jobs – is to disrupt the way we go about our day, to knock our headphones off. Since Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon in revenge for sacrificing their daughter (to sneak in a reference to Lizzie Stern’s accompanying essay), theater has been there to shake our foundational beliefs, poke holes in our theories, remember us to ourselves, to know other ways of thinking. Not all theater of course -- some plays are Pippin – but the sort of theater like Shawn’s play. Which sits in the continuum with Bruce Norris’ Downstate, up next onstage at Playwrights Horizons.
If you haven’t already read the blurb, Downstate is set in a halfway house for post-incarcerated male sex offenders, all of whom have served their sentence in prison, but whose crimes are considered by many to be unforgiveable, the worst imaginable. At rise, one of the residents, Fred, a former piano teacher, is visited by Andy, one of his victims from decades ago. What Fred did to Andy has seismically impacted both men’s lives. Both men are suffering in different ways. Andy’s suffering from the debilitating anxiety, depression, guilt and shame that burdens survivors of sexual abuse. Fred, meanwhile, is suffering in the purgatory of a halfway house, and from violent attacks on him as a known abuser. Andy’s hope is that, after all this time, confronting Fred may finally bring him peace.
In an interview with Steppenwolf, who premiered Downstate in 2018, Bruce Norris spoke about the impetus to write the play: “I fear that what gets left out of the current national conversation is any mention of… forgiveness. We’d prefer to luxuriate in our righteous hatred for each other right now, in a way that feels cruel and grotesque and tribal. So, with all of that, the thought occurred to me—how do we tamp down our retaliatory, visceral responses to these people we so easily despise? After all, pedophiles have to go on with their lives somehow, somewhere, right? And, I thought, to simply observe them going about their lives, living with the consequences of what they’ve done…that would require a pretty radical amount of compassion on the part of an audience.”
Photo by Michael Brosilow. Courtesy of Steppenwolf Theater Company.
Downstate holds its characters - both the survivor and the abuser - as full humans deserving of compassion. The play asks us to feel for Andy, to see the depth of his pain and the fragility of his grip on himself. And the play also asks us to feel for the residents of the halfway house. This is a challenge: as monstrous as their crimes are, as difficult as it is to comprehend them, these sex offenders are individuals – complex and irreducible – and they have remained so long after incarceration. In asking us to witness them in the course of their lives over one day and night, Downstate offers a glimpse not just of their individuality, their realness, but of the beliefs we adopt that deny them this and allow us comfort.
The best plays leave us with more questions than answers. Downstate doesn’t give us any solution to what occurs onstage, nor does it suggest any conclusions. It imagines a possible confrontation between individuals in all of their complexity, who can’t find their way to move beyond the violence embedded in their pasts – and then it imagines a possible result. It conjures discomfort and anger, and frustration, and endless questions. And it’s precisely from that place, the mess and the muck of our response to the tale we’ll witness together in a theater, that we can begin to talk about forgiveness and envision new ways to live in the imperfect world we share.
