Bruce Norris is an American actor and playwright who, in his own words, “owns a very attractive glass paperweight with the profile of Joseph Pulitzer etched into it.” He earned this particular piece of office supplies—a Pulitzer Prize for Drama—-for his 2010 play, Clybourne Park, a provocative comedy about race, class, and real estate inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. It also won the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Tony Award for Best Play, the only play to date to win all three.
Norris’s journey to his award-laden desk began in Houston, where he attended an independent school district zoned to remain segregated and the same Episcopal church as the Bush family. By 13, he was an atheist and involved in the theater, developments likely supported by his mother Jane, who harbored unfulfilled artistic aspirations until her death in 1987, when Norris was in his late 20s.
“She encouraged dissent and subversion at every turn. She wanted us to be expressive and questioning rather than obedient, and she was also very unhappy and basically drank and smoked herself into an early grave,” the writer later shared with Chicago Magazine.
After high school, he studied scenic design at Boston University before transferring to Northwestern University. Over the next two decades, he regularly tread Chicago and Off Broadway stages, racked up three Broadway credits, and appeared in television shows and movies, including Law & Order and The Sixth Sense.
In 1992, Norris wrote and performed in his first play, The Actor Retires, about a self-important actor who decides to cash in his career to make furniture. He directed his next play, The Vanishing Twin, at Lookingglass Theatre four years later. Set in an unnamed Germanic country in the 19th century, the play shows what happens when a forbidden door is unlocked and family secrets rush out.
His breakout play, The Infidel, appeared at Steppenwolf in 2000. Described by the company as a gripping exploration of “sexual obsession and the legislation of human behavior,” the production was directed by Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s Artistic Director and one of Norris’s most ardent champions. Steppenwolf has produced nine of Norris’ subsequent plays, including: the premiere of The Pain and the Itch (2006); in which an unnamed secret gnaws away at a well-off family; Domesticated (2013), about a political sex scandal; the premiere of The Qualms (2014), featuring debates about marriage and imperialism at a swingers’ weekend getaway; and the premiere of Downstate (2018), set in a group home for men who have been convicted and served sentences for child sexual abuse.
"Bruce has always been a person who is engaged, and interrogates very deeply how to be in the world," Lavey shared with a Chicago publication. "He’s suspicious of received truths."
"Interrogate” is a good description of Norris’s writing process. “A play first takes the form of an argument in my head,” the playwright shared in a discussion with Anna D. Shapiro, who has directed four of his plays at Steppenwolf. “People form different opinions about a situation—let’s say a political situation—and I try to take those various points of view. I divide the argument and see how it can be arranged as a story.”
Norris’s plays are far from polemics, nor are his characters only mouthpieces for conflicting ideas and beliefs, though there are plenty of those. With a satirist’s eye for human behavior, Norris writes characters who blunder, lie, sting, self-deceive, and incriminate to beat the band. Hypocrisies are exposed, inconsistencies are revealed, and good intentions come to ruin. These twists are so familiar they can provoke a shudder, a rueful chuckle, or a palliative laugh.
While Norris is quick to downplay the notion that a play can “change the world,” his work does ask his audience members to take a hard look at themselves and their society. And then, if we don’t like what we see, his plays push us not to stay quiet about it.
—Chad Dexter Kinsman