Downstate (4*)

Pedophiles are human beings, too.

That was my primary takeaway from Downstate, an extraordinarily provocative drama from Bruce Norris, who knows he's playing with fire.  After all, the Booth Theatre's marquee asks, quoting the always unimpeachable New York Post, "How can you miss the play THAT WILL THOROUGHLY PISS OFF HALF OF AMERICA?"

But Downstate mostly made me uncomfortable perhaps because I know what it feels like to be reviled for a sexual orientation that during adolescence I desperately hoped to change, but couldn't.  Still, this engagingly directed (Joe Mantello) and finely acted drama all around strands the audience on a very slippery slope:  how DO you protect children from predators many of whom are a lot more monstrous than the four registered sex offenders that Norris depicts in a group home who have just been paid a visit by one of their former victims? 

Both race and class enter the moral equation, too, muddying things in the way that real life does. The shame that well-to-do Andy still feels after the abuse he experienced at the hands of Fred (Francis Guinan), his mild piano teacher--wrenchingly described by Thomas Sadoski in a scene that recalls a similarly devastating monologue by Leslie Manville in last season's Oedipus in content if not quite in the skill of its delivery--inspires contempt in Dee (K. Todd Freeman, superb), a self-described Black, gay, elderly convict who has served 15 years in prison because he had what appears to have been a consensual relationship with a decades-younger gay teenager. Refusing to recognize the power imbalance, Dee calls what they had love, and offers six years of letters he received from the individual after his conviction as evidence. In Dee's socioeconomically disadvantaged eyes, honky suburban boy Andy doesn't know from suffering.

Gender also factors into the house dynamics.  Ivy (Liza Colón-Zayas, as forceful here as she is gratefully accommodating in The Bear), the no-nonsense law enforcement liaison with the men, sees the actions of Felix (Adrian Martinez) and Gio (Al'Jaleel McGhee, the very personification of a live wire) two heterosexual offenders--both of whom cloak themselves in scripture the way their gay housemates do with Diana Ross and Frederic Chopin--through the prism of their young victims.  This explains why Ivy pushes Felix, a Latino parking garage employee and certainly not the brightest bulb in the house, up against a wall. His determination to wish his 15-year-old daughter happy birthday results in the play's most shocking scene.  It also exposes Andy's previously expressed assertion that death may be preferable to life in some circumstances as performative self-pity or possibly just acute depression, depending on your sympathies.

Gio, a loudmouthed hustler whose self-centered antics provide a welcome respite from the play's grimness, is perhaps the most relatable of the men as a "level one" offender which, IMHO, at least means that our judicial system has attempted to recognize that some offenses are worse than others, so long as both the perpetrator and his victim are heterosexual.  Gio insists that any straight man who professes not to be attracted to teenage girls is lying. Norris and Mantello stack the deck a bit here:  it's hard to imagine pert Effie (the inimitable Ivy Wolk, who elevates annoying to an art form), his co-worker at Staples and his smart-assed paramour lacking agency even in infancy.  

While equanimity is certainly a laudable goal in our polarized society, I doubt that Norris will engender much sympathy for the way sex offenders are treated. Most people will remain as myopic as Andy's wife Em (Cassie Beck), who represents the 50% of the audience Downstate will piss off or, more likely, the much vaster number of theater-goers who will refuse to see the play on the basis of its subject. Like Ivy says to Dee after he schools her on a tribe in New Guinea where young boys fellate their elders as a rite of passage ((I would have been a lot more dubious about this assertion if I hadn't also recently read an article in The New Yorker about a Nobel- winning prize scientist whose study of this particular tribe enabled his own pedophilia), "you know what you did is wrong."