Everybody Loves Bruce Norris

Except Bruce Norris. The playwright’s growing notoriety as a social satirist is surpassing his success as an actor, and Chicago’s top directors value him as an original mind and an excellent dinner companion. But nothing saves him (or the rest of us) from his contempt

By Tony Adler

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I've said to him many times that he is never so eloquent as when he's describing something he despises."
–Helen, a character in Bruce Norris's The Infidel

Illustration by Joseph Adolphe

"I want to depict everyone as slightly ridiculous," Norris says, "but that's because I think I'm hugely ridiculous."

For a man accused of endangering the mental well-being of six-year-olds, Bruce Norris is astonishingly popular. His colleagues in the theatre admire him. The Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee has honored him. Critics respect him. Even the one woman in the world with an airtight case for hating him-the stage auteur Mary Zimmerman-loves him. More than one person I talked to called him a genius. Three, in fact. And the actress Laurie Metcalf allows as how "he's a critter, all right."

"I think Bruce is the goods," says Martha Lavey, the artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Norris's great professional patron. Sara Garonzik, the producing artistic director of the Philadelphia Theatre Company, calls him "one of the most original voices writing in American theatre today."

The only outright detractor I encountered was Norris himself.

A performing-arts polymath whose acting credits range from Broadway to the role of the stressed-out, stuttering teacher in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, Bruce Norris badmouths Bruce Norris-often savagely and in public-every chance he gets.

And yet it would not necessarily be right to consider that proof of self-loathing. Because, in fact, Norris stands ready to badmouth practically anybody and anything-especially if, like him, it smacks of bourgeois hypocrisy. "I want to depict everyone as slightly ridiculous, but that's because I think I'm hugely ridiculous," he declares with characteristically wry charm, his voice and manner suggesting a Wasp Woody Allen. Given that we are all swine-and cannot really help being swine-the only morally valid response is to acknowledge it. So he does.

At 46, Norris's growing notoriety as a brilliant, remorseless social satirist is well on its way to superseding his established success as an actor. In five plays written and produced since 1999 (including The Unmentionables, scheduled to première at Steppenwolf on June 29th with a cast that features Ora Jones, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf, and Amy Morton), Norris has established a reputation for bloodletting with a smile and a classical sense of dramatic structure.

That reputation took both a leap and a beating last summer with Steppenwolf's première production of The Pain and the Itch, Norris's pitch-black farce about an upper-middle-class politically liberal family with an ugly secret that will not stay hidden. Their panicked attempts to ignore the obvious result in (a) mayhem and (b) a chain of events that lead, absurdly but inevitably, to the death of an innocent. The charge of messing with six-year-old psyches stems from casting two little girls in this show who alternated playing four-year-old Kayla, the daughter of the family. Not only were the child actors expected to participate in the hysteric vulgarity of a breathtakingly dysfunctional household but they also had to physicalize Kayla's mysterious, dramatically significant genital rash-i.e., scratch their crotches a lot.

Chris Jones, the theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune, took exception. "There's something cheap about using a child as merely some kind of victimized vessel for adult failings," Jones wrote in a Sunday commentary. "I could not watch . . . any of the scenes involving this child-without my head popping out of the play and into the world of the little actress. What did she know? What did she feel? What was she told?"

Fair-minded to the point of diffidence, Jones's essay was followed five days later by a ham-handed Chicago Sun-Times piece on the same subject. Under the headline "Child acting or abuse?" the reporter Misha Davenport named the little girls (which Jones had refrained from doing) and, while quoting only one theatregoer, claimed that "some" had objected to Steppenwolf's handling of the children.

Something bad hit the fan. Jones told me that after the Sun-Times story appeared, the mother of one of the Kaylas "called up very upset. I remember her saying to me, ‘You Google my daughter's name and you get "child abuse." How do I erase that?'" The play's director, Anna D. Shapiro, was hit hard as well. "I didn't like what I was being accused of," she says. "I have six nieces and nephews who are the most important people in the world to me, and I did not have a thick skin about that."

Norris, meanwhile, was annoyed that the controversy he had hoped to incite had misfired. Very much like the family in The Pain and the Itch, he felt, people were using a specious issue-child protection-to avoid dealing with the real one: "Is something about the way we're living problematic?" When the Jeff Committee gave The Pain and the Itch an award for best new work of the 2004-5 season, Norris began his acceptance speech with a jab. "You know, normally when you abuse little girls you do prison time," he said, laying his trophy on the lectern. "So this is much better."

***

"What an astonishing volume of horseshit people expect you to swallow. Do you know what I mean? What a staggering, towering load of pure unreconstituted crap."
–Purdy, a character in Norris's Purple Heart

Bruce Norris comes from Houston, where his family attended the same Episcopal church as George H. W. Bush. He discarded his Lone Star accent in junior high, he says, because he was "ashamed to be from Texas." The middle child between his younger sister, Jana, who grew up to be a veterinarian, and his older brother, John, a news correspondent for MTV, Bruce discovered the theatre at about the same time as he dropped his twang. "I'm extraordinarily lazy by nature and it's a lazy person's job and so I totally gravitated," he says. "I liked everything about the theatre. The first time I ever made out was in a carpool for a production of The Sound of Music. I made out with one of the other von Trapp children."

Norris's mother-Margaret Jane Tatum Norris, known to her friends as Jane-"wanted to be an artist but gave it up to have kids," Norris remembers. "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."

His father, John Edward, an internist, became a "born-again, serious Christian" after Jane's death in 1987. "Before her death," Bruce offers, "he was just an average run-of-the-mill control freak." Needless to say, he wasn't any too enthusiastic about Bruce's love of the theatre.

And apparently he still isn't. At a recent family gathering for père Norris's 80th birthday, Bruce says, "my father told me he felt I was writing plays that harm society. I didn't really have an answer. You're shocked when your father tells you that you're hurting the world. It's a very tough relationship. I try to decode his condemnations of me. I try to decode them as concern. He has told me on many, many occasions that I'm going to hell. I assume that means, ‘Take care of yourself.' I don't have much evidence to support that position, but I'm trying to optimistically think of him as concerned."

Damnation notwithstanding, Norris acted, sang, and danced his way through adolescence, working professionally on the local stage and in television. From high school he went to Boston University, where he studied scenic design, then transferred to Northwestern University.

Photograph: Louis Lanzano/
Associated Press

Mary Zimmerman in New York for The Metamorphoses

Which is where he met Mary Zimmerman.

"I remember what I call the first moment I saw him, although I'd known him for a year," says Zimmerman, the Tony Award–winning adapter and director whose own brilliance has been authenticated by a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. "I was waiting to rehearse with him and he came around the corner-it was a very windy day-and he kind of turned to face the wind, turned into profile, and I just felt like I was in a falling elevator. . . .

"He was always the most vivid personality, always the funniest person, the most charming, the most handsome. He dated everyone. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was one of his girlfriends, and I had a deep desire not to get in line."

Instead, Zimmerman "schemingly" invited him to take a room in the big apartment she was renting with some other students. "And then, during the course of the next few weeks or months," she recalls, "we became boyfriend and girlfriend." They were 19 at the time; they would stay together for the next 16 years.

Norris will not talk about the circumstances of his breakup with Zimmerman-in part, I suspect, because they are so embarrassingly banal. Zimmerman, however, is blunt. "He had an affair with someone I knew very well," she tells me. "And they had it for three years and lied to me about it for three years."

Zimmerman goes on to describe the "colossally damaging" consequences of this betrayal, her voice shaking at times, although a decade has passed. But then she ends up with something genuinely unexpected. Something that suggests the uncanny loyalty, delight, even sense of destiny that surround Norris for all that he badmouths the world and himself: "I think we fell in love over talk, and that really never stopped and hasn't stopped to this day. We still talk three, four times a week. In fact, the proudest accomplishment of my life by far"-says the woman who made her adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses a hit on Broadway-"is that I'm friends with Bruce. That may sound doormatty, but we are a comfort in each other's lives."