Downstate

Downstate puts four convicted sex offenders in a shared, state-supervised house and then sends in one of their victims, now middle aged, to read out a statement he has been preparing for years. What he wants from the encounter, and whether anyone in that room is capable of giving it to him, is the play's entire subject.

The men live under curfews, ankle monitors and a map of streets they are not allowed to walk down. Their offences are not equivalent and the play refuses to flatten them into one thing. Andy arrives with his wife and a script. Fred, elderly and in a wheelchair, is unfailingly gentle and entirely unforgivable. The confrontation keeps stalling, restarting and being derailed by the household's petty grievances, which is exactly how the play traps its audience.

Bruce Norris wrote it. He is best known for Clybourne Park, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and he works the same way here: a comedy of manners built on a subject that should not permit one. The play premiered in 2018 and has divided audiences ever since, largely because it declines to tell them what to feel.

It is funnier than the premise allows and colder than the comedy suggests. The discomfort is structural. Sympathy keeps arriving at the wrong moment and attaching to the wrong person, and the writing never lets anyone settle into a safe position for long. Nobody is redeemed here and nobody is waved away.

It is for people who want a play to argue with them rather than agree with them. Performed live, in one room, with no way to look away and no edit to cut to, the discomfort is the experience rather than a side effect of it.