Downstate

Four years after its Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons, Bruce Norris's shattering drama—which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play—arrives on Broadway with a new director, Joe Mantello, but retaining the earlier version's two superb central actors, Francis Guinan and K. Todd Freeman. Norris gives voice to the unspeakable: It is set at a shabby group residence for men who have finished their prison sentences for sexually abusing minors. The play lays bare the blind spots and self-deceptions of the ex-cons even it also pokes at the penal system and, most provocatively, at the rage that can bubble just beneath a set of liberal pieties. Brace yourself.