David Harrower’s searing drama “Blackbird,” a play about a young woman who confronts the man who sexually abused her as a 12-year-old child, is familiar to regular theatergoers. The highly regarded play — justly so, in my view — was memorably staged in Chicago at the Victory Gardens Theater in 2009 with Mattie Hawkinson and Billy Petersen. And it was seen on Broadway in 2016 with Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels. I won’t easily forget either staging.

But this is no longer 2016, and I didn’t think anyone would rush to stage this play in Chicago again. It has attracted criticism for seeming to humanize the abuser (similar charges, of course, were made against Bruce Norris’ superb “Downstate,” which looked at this issue in a rather more expansive way). I was wrong about that: “Blackbird”

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