Downstate
Downstate is a 2018 Bruce Norris play centering on a group of four Child Sex Offenders, and detailing society's disproportionate response towards them.
The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote in his review:
The setting is a group home in downstate Illinois, where four men with previous convictions live in uneasy confinement. To his credit, Norris shows that sex criminals are individuals rather than a uniform class. The main action stems from the confrontation of Fred, a gentle figure in a motorised wheelchair, with one of his victims, the tormented Andy. But, while Fred is seemingly penitent, his fellow inmate, Dee, shows little remorse for a long-term relationship he had with one of the Lost Boys in a touring production of Peter Pan. Dee is also vehemently at odds with the mouthy Gio, guilty of an offence with a teenage girl. Completing this unhappy quartet is Felix, whose crimes involved his own daughter. [...] But, without exonerating his characters, Norris shows how they react in different ways to their guilt: Fred, for instance, openly acknowledges it, while the noisily articulate Gio lives in a state of denial. Through the presence of a probation officer, Norris also reminds us that the men are increasingly subject to territorial limits: stopping them shopping at a nearby supermarket hardly feels like a major protection of the public. Norris raises all kinds of key questions about how far society’s punitive approach should go: only in the US are registries of sex offenders easily available to the public on the web.[1]