Yeah, about that slippery slope thing. It turns out we’re in free fall.

Here’s some snippets from the review of a play about a group of pedos living in a halfway house of some sort.

Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play, “Downstate”: that the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane.
Are you still reading? It’s almost impossible to broad-brush the perspective at the heart of this impeccably acted drama without sounding as if one is advocating some extraordinary level of consideration for individuals who have committed unspeakable crimes. And yet Norris proposes a variation on this proposition at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons: He is questioning what degree of compassion should society fairly hold out to those who have served their time for sexual abuse, assault or rape...

“Some theatergoers no doubt will resent that Norris chose to illuminate this delicate subject in a nuanced way that doesn’t jibe with their own undiluted revulsion. If you suspect you are one of these people, “Downstate” is not for you. For many others, it will be a stunning demonstration of the power of narrative art to tackle a taboo, to compel us to look at a controversial topic from novel perspectives. It’s been the job of drama to accomplish this since the days of Henrik Ibsen, who in plays such as “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts” executed headlong dives into issues that splintered the foundations of conventional wisdom.”

But wait. Get actually gets worse. If you can believe it, it does.

Who’s the villain of the piece? No, seriously. Guess.

It’s a while male businessman who comes to confront his now elderly abuser. Here’s what the WaPo has to say about this:

It develops here as an agonizing moral question, one that our retributive correctional culture would rather not have to debate. And it is made even thornier by the drama’s most disagreeable character, a victim of Fred’s, now grown up and portrayed all too irritatingly well by Tim Hopper.

Hopper’s Andy arrives at the home with his misguidedly encouraging wife Em (Sally Murphy) to confront Fred. The playwright cannot hide his scorn for Andy, who has made a successful life for himself as a Chicago finance guy and now seems intent on some kind of purging reunion with the man who molested him as a child on a piano bench. The meeting seems to be part of Andy’s therapy, which “Downstate” implies may be advisable but at this point also suggests that it is an indulgent marinating in self-pity.

We are meant to note the chasm in Andy and Fred’s circumstances and the perhaps overlong gestation of Andy’s desire for that suspect experience, “closure.” Fred’s loss of mobility came about after he was set upon and beaten brutally in prison. Context is all, for as Andy stumbles through a recitation of his psychic pain and suffering, we have the physical evidence of the price that Fred has already paid. Norris’s juxtaposition in this regard feels cheap. There was a way, I think, to acknowledge the damage that’s been done to Andy without judgmentally minimizing it.

So yeah, the play minimized this adult male’s pain of being molested as a child because the abuser was paralyzed in prison and that’s so much worse.

Oh really?

Yet somehow the WaPo declares this play “brilliant” and “scintillating.”

You spelled “disgusting” and “misguided” wrong.


HT Steve Deace