Co-commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain, Downstate premiered at Steppenwolf in Fall 2018 before transferring to London in Spring 2019, under the direction of frequent Norris collaborator Pam MacKinnon. Playwrights Horizons gave the show its New York debut in Fall 2022, which garnered rave reviews from audiences and critics, and condemnation from some politicians and pundits.
Norris has spoken several times about the play, which earned its writer an Equity Jeff Award for Best New Play in 2019, a 2023 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play award, and the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting. Here are excerpts from those interviews that have guided the production team of Studio Theatre’s production of Downstate.
“I’m very obsessed with consensus, and how consensus makes me uncomfortable, and especially when consensus is around something that urges us to take a collective action of harm against people. And in the case of sex offenders, if you look online at any story about a crime that happened and the person who perpetrated that crime, the conversation quickly devolves into one of vigilantism and a kind of collective need to purge the person from society and put them beyond civilization, beyond consideration. And that makes me distinctly uncomfortable because I think that every single person is worthy of at least consideration as a human being, despite the terrible things they’ve done.”—2022 interview with WYNC’s All of It
“I think we’re living through an era of ‘payback.’ The entire 2016 election was apparently one massive act of collective psychological revenge by one group against another, elevating a man pathologically obsessed with avenging himself against his perceived enemies. And—I want to be careful how I say this—even positive social movements like #MeToo run the risk of tipping over into vengeance as those of us on the left attempt to purge ourselves of any stain of ideological impurity. And I fear that what gets left out of the current national conversation is any mention of… forgiveness.” —Interview with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 2018
“I’m not, in any way, endorsing pedophilia. But I think society needs to identify a collective villain that we can persecute in some way. I think it’s kind of essential for societies to point to, ‘Well, there’s a witch, and the witch lives in our town, and we need to burn the witch,’ or ‘There’s a dangerous Black man we need to lynch in the town.’ There’s something primal that makes us want to identify and persecute a collective villain. And I think pedophiles are a very convenient target. I grew up among them and wasn’t harmed by them, but I know a number of people who were.” —2022 interview with Observer
“I would say that one of the few areas where conservatives and liberals, at least in the US, really lock arms is over child sexual activity. I mean, everyone can hate a pedophile. That’s a universal monster. So, in a weird way, I don’t think this play is as much about liberal orthodoxy as it is just broad cultural orthodoxy.” —2019 interview with National Theatre Talks
“One of the things that is difficult about discussing these kinds of crimes is that we tend to lump them all together as black and white. Either someone is a sex offender or they’re innocent. There are so many gradations in the experience of both the victims and the perpetrators…” —2022 interview with WYNC’s All of It
“...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.”— Interview with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 2018