Delving into the dark side

Playwright aims for discomfort

It's tricky trying to catch up with Bruce Norris these days.

The actor/playwright who has appeared in such films as "The Sixth Sense" and television programs including "Third Watch" and "Queens Supreme" was dashing off to do hair and makeup for yet another "Law & Order" episode when he picked up the phone, somewhat out of breath, and agreed to answer a few questions about his controversial satire "The Pain and the Itch." The play makes its Boston premiere with Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Theatre March 13-April 4.

Questions like: Why is this play so incredibly crude and disturbing?

"I take great pleasure in making people feel uncomfortable," he answers, seriously. "It's a story about what happens in families when you say you are one thing and you do something quite different."

The play is about a yuppie family - Kelly and Clay and their young daughter, Kayla - living in a picture-perfect home and trying to live according to progressive middle-class American ideals. Except they fail.

Clay, a stay-at-home dad, is desperately looking for validation from his attorney wife. Meanwhile their wide-screen television, their pride and joy, keeps malfunctioning and playing very . . . er, inappropriate shows. The house alarm keeps blaring, and a mysterious creature, perhaps a possum, has been eating the family's table display of avocados. Not to mention that Clay is hiding the fact that their daughter has a strange genital rash (thus the title "The Pain and the Itch").

Clay has a brutally menacing brother, Cash, whom he invites over for Thanksgiving, and an amazingly un-self-aware mother, Carol. And then there's Cash's girlfriend, who was brutalized as a child in Eastern Europe and doesn't mind talking about it.

The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks during which Kelly and Clay address Mr. Hadid, a grieving man who has found himself inside their home. As they comfort him over the loss of a loved one, they lapse into explaining what kind of people they are. By the end of the play each little nasty nugget of information adds up to a disturbing picture and, if the playwright gets his way, leaves audience members' stomachs turning.

"The Pain and the Itch" takes a bourgeois family and exposes its members for their hypocrisy when the idyllic lifestyle they try to protect goes terribly awry and the ugly truth finally unfolds. Norris says he had a lot on his mind when conceiving the play, particularly the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the lies people tell themselves to justify behaving badly.

"It's an elaborate extended metaphor for American self-justification for taking irrational self-defense measures for threats that weren't really there in the first place," he says.

For example, he says, a few years back he ran into a friend with a couple of children from Brooklyn who was carrying a huge bag.

"I asked her what was in the bag, and she said, 'I just bought a huge roll of duct tape and plastic sheeting,' " he says.

She said it was to protect her kids, he explains. Norris thinks that kind of irrational thinking from an otherwise rational person speaks to the essence of his play: that so-called liberals can be blinkered, too.

"For us on the left, it's hard to admit some level of hypocrisy," he says. "People have said to me, 'Oh. You're taking a cheap shot at the left,' or 'You must be Republican.' I grew up with Republicans in Houston, Texas; in fact, Barbara Bush was my brother's Sunday school teacher, but I am not a Republican."

The play was originally a commission for the Philadelphia Theatre Company.

"We did the first reading, and the artistic director said while she really liked the play she found it too disturbing for her audience to do," he says.

Norris finally took it to Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, followed by productions at Playwrights Horizons in New York and the Royal Court Theatre in London. Now it's coming to Company One, with Nancy E. Carroll in her company debut as Carol.

"I studied for a year at Boston University when I thought I wanted to be a set designer," says Norris. "Boston is my favorite city in the entire country because when I was growing up in Texas we seemed so boorish and backward and unsophisticated. I had all these fantasies about brick houses. I'm thrilled."