Bruce Norris May Be Trying to Make Me a Better Person

In an application to graduate school for acting, I wrote an essay that “I wanted to be an actor” because it offered a live philosophical exploration — that to step into the skin of a character and their context was to roam around, on a journey of discovery, in another worldview. And that was an internal exercise that I relished. (They let me in anyways.)

Bruce Norris had a robust career as an actor, but I think he came to find it… boring, often. So it is not surprising that he creates both elaborate moral obstacle courses and comparable challenges of craft for his actors. His plays usually inhabit both the architecture of farce and deeply-felt drama, and his collaborators must deftly pivot from one to the other, committing fully. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bad acting in a Bruce Norris play – and that’s a tribute to those individuals and his longtime collaborator, director Pam MacKinnon, as well. Downstate offers some of the finest acting I have seen, from start to finish. I could have sat in its excruciating final scene for hours to experience the mastery of Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman. The work is seamlessly executed, and its virtuosity both envelops us in great pain and lifts us out of it.

The excavations Bruce demands of his actors are not just ones he would relish personally, they consist of him personally. I suppose most writers put their own blood into their characters, but it's an especially powerful current within Bruce. He decants himself into them; everything that is moving, self-loathing, charming, destructive, rage-filled and grasping comes from his marrow. He disperses himself, prismatically, in his ensembles, and pits himself/them against each other, as they negotiate a morally and psychically complicated battleground. And the closer one resembles Bruce Norris – a straight white man of privilege – the harsher the scrutiny he gives them.

Bruce has a reputation as a provocateur and a gadfly. But he’s not trying to get the skin to itch a little, he is trying to dig under it. He wants us to prove our value system through a more rigorous examination than we are used to, by forcing us to look at things that are very easy to avoid. Bruce might be Shavian in his moralism – and in some ways the constructedness of his plays – but in Downstate, at least, the arguments are given their depth by their murkiness, by the mitigation of small, human details. Oh damn: these are actual people, not trash.

The animating problem in a Bruce Norris play – certainly this one – is the unwillingness or inability to hear or even countenance the experience and perspective of others. This can manifest on a range from obliviousness, to a deliberate refusal to listen, to caustic and cruel refutation. Regardless of the form it takes, it leads to destruction.

I am writing this during a time of great agitation in this country, in which there is radical disagreement on what would once have been considered facts, and rage-filled rejection of not just “the other side,” but between camps within each side. I have spent the last six years in the miserable knowledge that many people in my country hold beliefs that I find inexplicable and – increasingly – detestable. My imagination doesn’t want to hold these people and for the most part the world doesn’t make me. 

While I am revolted by the positions they support, and horrified by the amount of fear and hate and greed that seem to undergird them, I am not helped by considering my fellow citizens monsters. It doesn’t help me strategically, morally or emotionally. Rather, it hurts me. I’m left feeling confused, alone, disempowered and disconsolate.

Compassion is often an exercise of imagination, and the danger of its atrophy should be clear to all of us. Seeing and acknowledging complexity does not mean loving, forgiving, or accepting. It might, however, enable us to negotiate a more productive coexistence with others. And it almost certainly brings us closer to being the selves we aspire to be, or tell ourselves that we already are.

I am not yearning for communion with child predators. But I ask myself: Have I been served by refusing to acknowledge humanity and complexity in the lives of others? And my answer is: Nope, not much. Might I – might we – be helped by making room for that, by stretching the muscle of our compassion? 

Isn’t that worth trying?