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Casting is coming into focus for Broadway’s Downstate. According to the Chicago Tribune, Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman will star in the upcoming production of Bruce Norris’ play, which will play a limited engagement at the Booth Theatre this fall.
The production will be directed by Joe Mantello, who most recently helmed Broadway’s Death of a Salesman, and produced by Scott Rudin. Per the Tribune, the Broadway staging will be a separate production from the one seen at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2018. Additional casting has not yet been announced.
Guinan and Freeman are both longtime Steppenwolf ensemble members. The marquee at the Booth Theatre is now lit for the play, though an official announcement has not yet been made.
Downstate premiered at Steppenwolf in 2018 under the direction of Tony Award winner Pam MacKinnon, before making its New York City premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2022. Read the reviews from Chicago and New York.
Downstate surrounds a registered address in Downstate Illinois, where four men convicted of sex crimes share a group home, living out their days post-incarceration. Audiences witness a single day within the home where Fred, Dee, Gio, and Felix tightly cohabitate: four random lives thrust into shared space by only one chilling commonality. They have all been released back from their respective sentences into the permanent prison of an excommunicated existence.
On this summer day, the elderly, disabled Fred meets a visitor who has likewise been trapped in a half-life: Andy, a prisoner of the trauma Fred inflicted on him as a child. When Andy shows up to confront his childhood abuser, it becomes hard to locate the line between justice and retribution. Refusing cathartic responses and rushed moralism—and intricately problematizing both impulses towards righteous revenge and undue forgiveness—Downstate’s environment, and its sprawling connotations, open into larger questions about the risks of a moment in discourse propelled by dogmatism on both sides of the political spectrum.
