Bruce Norris

2006 Winner in
Drama

Bruce Norris is the author of The Qualms, which premiered in July 2014 at Steppenwolf Theatre, and Domesticated, which was commissioned by Lincoln Center and premiered there in November 2013. Earlier in 2013 the Royal Court premiered The Low Road in London. His play, Clybourne Park, won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2012, the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards (London) for Best Play, 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2011. It is currently receiving productions throughout the United States as well as Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. Other plays include The Infidel (2000), Purple Heart (2002), We All Went Down to Amsterdam (2003), The Pain and the Itch (2004), The Unmentionables (2006) and A Parallelogram (2010), all of which had their premieres at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago. His work has also been seen at Playwrights Horizons (New York), Lookingglass Theatre (Chicago), Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles), Philadelphia Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth Theatre (Washington, D.C.), Staatstheater Mainz (Germany) and the Galway Festival (Ireland), among others. His plays have been published by Northwestern University Press, Nick Hern Books, Faber & Faber and Dramatists Play Service. He is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwright Award (2009) as well as two Joseph Jefferson Awards (Chicago) for Best New Work. As an actor he can be seen in the films A Civil Action, The Sixth Sense and All Good Things. He lives in New York.

Reviews & Praise

“ . . . 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]

Selected Works

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Outside Links
Clybourne Park Trailer (Royal Court)