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
(page 2 of 2)
Photo: Robert Levy Photography and The Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee  |
| Norris accepting a Jeff Award for The Pain and the Itch as a best new work of the 2004-5 season. |
"Ya'll got your rules. Gotta have rules. Civilization grind to a halt no rules."
–Larry Cox, a character in Norris's We All Went Down to Amsterdam
Norris closed his Jeff Award acceptance speech by thanking his "great, dear friend Martha Lavey, who sort of dragged me out of the gutter . . . and gave me something to do with my time." The gutter she dragged him out of was his continued misery over the breakup with Mary Zimmerman; the something she gave him was the opportunity to write a script as part of Steppenwolf Theatre's New Plays Initiative.
Norris had already written a few things-among them, The Actor Retires, designed as a vehicle for his own performing skills; Up Against It, an adaptation of a Joe Orton screenplay, mounted by the Lookingglass Theatre Company; and The Vanishing Twin, "a Gothic burlesque with loud rock music," also mounted by Lookingglass. But Lavey opened the way for the sustained effort and exploration that have turned Norris into an honest-to-God playwright. Starting with The Infidel-about a state supreme court judge whose illicit affair has turned obsessive-Lavey's Steppenwolf has stuck by Norris even when others (like the Philadelphia Theatre Company, which initially commissioned The Pain and the Itch) have stepped back. "Martha has been in the shadows of every good thing that's happened for him in the last few years," says Anna Shapiro, the director.
Hepburn thin and Hepburn cultivated (it doesn't matter which Hepburn you picture, though I would say Katharine in The Rainmaker fits best), Lavey sees Norris as more than a talented writer. She also considers him an excellent dinner companion. And she understands that the same traits inform both roles: an original mind and a subversive sensibility. "That is one thing that I admire about Bruce as a person in the world and as an artist: he's constantly flirting with [controversy]," she says. "He will throw out an opinion or state an idea or insist upon an analogy that is so bracing, because part of his m.o. in the world is to be a provocateur."
Indeed, Norris remarks with evident pride, "Martha has referred to me as a ‘perseverator': I enjoy things that are hectoring and terrierlike [and] refuse to drop the topic. I've driven people away from dinner tables. If I get something stuck in my ass that I refuse to let go of, it's horrible-and yet it's thrilling for me to hammer someone." Thrilling? "To have them cave. Just to scourge them of their folly."
Note the biblical diction, the touch of the angry prophet. Norris may be more his father's son than he cares to believe. In any event, the impulse to scourge apparently runs deep. He says he even does it in his sleep. He recently had a dream, he reports, that he was having an argument with a professor in a classroom and was being so noisy about it that he drove people out of the room.
All this would make Norris look like nothing more than an unusually clever bully-a talented snot, awash in adolescent rage at the awful stupidity of it all-were it not for the fact that he whips himself, along with everyone else. "Where do I get off pretending to be a sort of ethical scourge?" he asks. "I'm a slimebag. I'm a terrible, awful person." His only saving grace, in his view, is that he is willing to admit it.
The artistic result is a series of plays in which no one stays clean. This bleak egalitarianism finds its ultimate expression in The Pain and the Itch, which may very well be a masterpiece. Combining the social acuity of a Wilde and the political scope of a Shaw with the lewd convolutions of Desperate Housewives, this play locates the Ship of Fools in a city duplex. It is telling that the one character who sees through a great deal of the ugliness, and might therefore be thought of as a surrogate for the author, turns out to be the biggest scumbag of all.
Where does a vision like this come from?
For Lavey, it has to do with Norris's moral and intellectual rigor. "Bruce has always been a person who is engaged, and interrogates very deeply how to be in the world," she says. "He's suspicious of received truths." In short, he sees things as they are.
For Anna Shapiro, it is more personal than that. "In Bruce's thinking people will inevitably fail you," she tells me-and it is hard to dispute her when you consider his parents: the loving but self-destructive mother, the father right out of East of Eden. But certainly things have improved since he left Texas. What about the adoration of friends like Lavey and Zimmerman? Of Shapiro herself, who is currently staging her fourth Norris play and regards their collaboration as "the most rewarding artistic relationship" of her life? Why such a vast gap between the loyalty he clearly experiences and the mendacity that saturates his plays? "He lives in the pain of that gap," Shapiro says. "The truth is, obviously he has been let down-and more to the point, he has let down others. He has disappointed in his life, and he is in pain-no matter how much he jokes about it. . . . He's driven to look at that."
***
Photography: Michael Brosilow  |
| Norris with Anna D. Shapiro, the Pain and the Itch's director |
"But don't you see the rather comic dimension of it all? You don't? Look, you want to be more like us . . . but we're a bunch of assholes."
–Cash, an American-born character in The Pain and the Itch, to an African-born taxi driver"
Norris does not earn much income as a playwright. Living alone in two meticulously kept rooms in Brooklyn Heights (he moved east after breaking up with Zimmerman and has not shared a household since), he maintains his "time-wasting" lifestyle by acting in "the occasional episode of Law & Order or something like that." A couple of years ago he played Jack Black's brother in School of Rock-a role that was eliminated from the film but made him "an astonishing amount of money."
This is "someone who has only held a straight job for a few weeks in his whole life," Zimmerman says. He was a pro going into college and started getting cast as soon as he graduated. By 1987, he had understudied Matthew Broderick in the Broadway production of Biloxi Blues and starred in his own (short-lived) TV sitcom, The Popcorn Kid.
He likes his current, minimal approach to acting because it frees him from worrying about the economic consequences of writing his plays. He may have to start worrying soon, though. In September, Playwrights Horizons will mount The Pain and the Itch, giving Norris his first New York production and the validation that comes with it.
In the meantime there is The Unmentionables, which offers a first of its own in that it is Norris's first play set outside the United States-in an unnamed West African nation not unlike Equatorial Guinea.
Even so, Americans and their collective neuroses are still the dominant focus. Especially their need to be seen as noble no matter how monstrously they behave. Unfolding over the course of a single night, the script anatomizes corrupt Yankee industrialists alongside holier-than-thou Yankee do-gooders in the context of a country where people are poor, resources are rich, and enforcement gets rough at times. "Either [the American characters] have decided to go there to make money but are telling themselves it's for the good of the community, or they've gone there to do good for the community but in fact are trying to gratify their own egos," Norris explains. "So it's all about what people intend and what they say they intend."
And who pays, of course, when everything gets screwed up. There are no pure acts, no altruistic gestures, and certainly no heroes in Norris's theatrical world. He is the bard of unintended consequences-every attempt to do right becomes its own punishment and nobody but nobody comes away untainted. Not even little Kayla. Which is why Norris's satire can seem as deeply sad as it is hilarious. I asked Norris if it was possible for an American to lead a moral life. "Not really," he replied. "You could move. But where would you move to? I think ethical behavior should extend as far as your arm. You can try your best to do things that are ethical beyond that radius, but I think ultimately it's kind of hopeless because human nature is indifferent to something like ethics. That's sort of what The Unmentionables is about. To go around with a plan how to make the world a better place usually results in the opposite. You're best to go to your grave having made no difference at all. That's about the best you can do."
Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »
