Bruce Norris

“ . . . superb, elegantly written, and hilarious . . . Norris uses ordinary incident and palaver to build an extraordinary tableau of the coded bigotry behind which the white characters in the fifties hide their hypocrisy from themselves . . . Norris is a fully hatched talent, and this is a fully hatched play.” —The New Yorker [on Clybourne Park]

“The best new play in many a season. There are heady, farcical peaks to this comedy that approach the manic genius of Preston Sturges. But Mr. Norris' real target is that great sentimental sham, the idealized American family.” —The New York Observer [on The Pain and the Itch]

“Mr. Norris has perhaps the most teasingly paradoxical voice in American theater today. While his savage comedies have the reputation of being unusually bold conversation starters—daring to venture where political correctness fears to tread—they are ultimately about the impossibility of an equable exchange of ideas. Though he uses a varied and explosive vocabulary, galloping between fashionable gobbledygook and Anglo-Saxon bluntness, words almost always ring hollow in Mr. Norris’s work. Much of his humor and pathos come from his characters’ awareness that language fails them. These people don’t have the tools to say what they so desperately need to say, and it’s not because they’re undereducated. It’s because they’re human. That semantic tragedy is the basis of comedy for Mr. Norris, and it gives his plays their form as well as their content.” —The New York Times [on Domesticated]