Spotlight on ... Bruce Norris, Steppenwolf playwright

Actor-turned-playwright Bruce Norris was commissioned to write The Pain and the Itch by Philadelphia Theatre Company, but the work was considered "too dirty" for the group to produce, Norris says. Now Steppenwolf is mounting it, the company's fourth Norris play. A working actor (he was stuttering Stanley in The Sixth Sense), an industry veteran (he's 45; "be sure to print that in big letters") and Mary Zimmerman's former steady for 16 years, Norris isn't exactly short on opinions. He started by explaining the pain of sitting in on Itch rehearsals.

Bruce Norris: I feel really embarrassed and ashamed whenever I voice my opinion because [the actors are] always asking me, "Is that right?" And if I say, "No," then I always feel like a horrible, power-mad autocrat, which I suppose I am to some extent, but I hate for people to know it. So, wait, are you technically a critic?
Time Out Chicago: I am a critic.
BN: How can you do that? It's just wrong. It's the dark side. You could be doing so much valuable service.
TOC: You don't think critics provide any service?
BN: Everyone always says to me, "What about the good critics? What about Kenneth Tynan? What about George Bernard Shaw?" And I always think, "Well, that's not the good thing they did." No one's ever going back to—oh, all right, whatever. Okay. You have to cut that out.
TOC: I can't use that quote?
BN: No, no, I'm saying you have to cut out being a critic. You're not really making a lot of money being a critic, are you?
TOC: Tell me what your play's about.
BN: It's about a [white] family that, over the course of one Thanksgiving, discovers that something rather unfortunate has happened to their four-year-old daughter. And in seeking to assign blame for what has happened to their daughter, they cause great harm to someone else who had nothing to do with it. And, uh, I can get all pretentious and try to say what that metaphorically refers to.
TOC: Okay.
BN: It's pretty obvious when you see the play because the person who suffers happens to be a Muslim man. The play metaphorically has to do with the way we responded to international circumstances in the last five years. And so it's a bilious, nasty, satirical portrait of what we're like.
TOC: The white family stands in for the U.S.?
BN: Ideally, it could be read in a couple different ways. The panic that accompanies notions of child abuse in this country, that there is an innocent and vulnerable figure, the child, that if attacked demands immediate and overwhelming response to the attacker. And in a larger sense, that's what we do internationally. Something bad happened to us, and so instead of using that opportunity to correct that problem, we attack people who actually were not involved in the horrible event that a few people in America—statistically, very few—were affected by.
TOC: So your relationship with Steppenwolf. What's that like?
BN: It's a funny thing, the whole Steppenwolf mythos, which is they do edgy, provocative, over-the-top drama. The more entrenched you get as a theater, the harder it is to do that and to risk losing subscribers, but I don't think they've reached that point yet.
TOC: Has Steppenwolf lost its daring?
BN: Well, look, this play, The Pain and the Itch. There is nothing about it that is formally challenging. I want to write in a traditional voice because it would only be a reflection of my own ego if what I wanted people to appreciate was the masterful way in which I deployed language or structure. What's interesting to me is what content you bring to storytelling. I mean, theater has always been a luxury commodity for the consumption of the privileged. So you write plays knowing that, and if you don't address who's sitting there watching it, then I feel like it's a squandered opportunity.
TOC: So what do you make of more visually experimental and playful styles of theater that are less text-based?
BN: [Mary Zimmerman and I] have an ongoing debate about whether or not it's a valid—this sounds so arrogant—a valid ethical act to offer beauty to people who have beauty in such abundance. In other words, wealthy people who can afford a $60 theater ticket.
TOC: Why should we see your play?
BN: You probably have nothing better to do.—Novid Parsi

The Pain and the Itch is in previews at Steppenwolf.