… to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time, it is eternity's demand upon him.

Soren Kierkegaard¹

As a writer, you go in to the theatre to search, and if you do your work you find something. Or at least you identify the path.

Marsha Norman, interviewed by Sherilyn Beard

A playwright of power and perception, Marsha Norman dramatizes the personal crises of ordinary people struggling to have a self and be a self. “What interests me is survival,” says Norman, “what it takes to survive. I find people very compelling who are at that moment of choice. Will they die or go on? If they go on, in what direction or for what purpose?” (Beard, p. 17). With honesty and compassion, Norman places her characters in critical situations where they are forced to make this decision. Be it a convicted murderer in Getting Out or a cancer surgeon in Traveler in the Dark, her characters are compelling, her focus on survival unwavering. The subject of survival and the seriousness, sensitivity, and eloquence of its presentation have prompted critics in America and abroad to draw parallels between this contemporary American playwright and Samuel Beckett. Certainly, her focus on helplessness, autonomy, and isolation, as well as the predominance of waiting and the simplicity of dialogue, setting, and structure, may remind us of the great Irish writer. Images of entrapment and sickness, the use of couples, humor—however bleak—to undercut and underscore pain are additional qualities we have come to associate with Beckett's work.

Tom Moore, the director of 'night, Mother and Traveler in the Dark, sees her greatest affinity, however, to Chekhov, and this analogy can certainly be supported by the realistic detail, progression in time, use of confessions, sonatalike structure, and the awareness of the pain of solitude apparent even in Norman's one-act plays (Moore, p. 2). And comparisons can be drawn between Harold Pinter's and Norman's uses of intrusion, memory, betrayal, and the unreliability of truth. Norman, like Pinter, employs two silences: one silence is the absence of speech with which we are familiar, while the other, a torrent of speech, is a desperate attempt to “keep ourselves to ourselves” (Pinter, p. 25).

Parallels also abound between Norman and Sam Shepard, especially in the raunchiness and explosiveness of dialogue, the sense of the dramatic, the desire to say the unsayable, the portrayal of ambivalent familial relationships, and the use of familiar household items for symbol and stage business. Ironically, the titles of Shepard's plays might well be those of Norman's: Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, A Lie of the Mind. And one can identify analogues in the plays of Lanford Wilson, whose Mound Builders, 5th of July, Hot'l Baltimore, and Serenading Louie portray ruined expectations, failed relationships, the impact of the past on the present, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communicating our deepest fears.

But none of these men focuses as sharply as Norman does on mothering nor offers as many portraits of mother and child. Although Norman does not want her drama labeled “women's theater,” Mel Gussow correctly observes that a primary theme of Norman's work, obvious in the title of her first play Getting Out, is the struggle of leave-taking, the severing of blood ties, marriage, and the past (p. 25). “There comes a moment,” explains the playwright, “when we have to release our parents from our expectations.” The ties that bind, stifle, and suffocate are many. From Norman's perspective “one of the problems for daughters and sons is that you come into life with an unpayable debt, the mortgage of all time” (Gussow, p. 39).

Such an emotionally charged comment invites questions about Norman's relationship with her own mother. While silent on that subject, the playwright speaks freely about growing up in a world of isolation and enforced good cheer. She was not permitted to play with other children nor watch television for fear that these influences might corrupt her. Recalling her disciplined fundamentalist Christian upbringing, Norman remembers: “My mother had a very serious code about what you could and could not say. You particularly could not say anything that was in the least angry or that had any conflict in it at all” (Stone, p. 57). Beyond her mother's hearing, however, the future playwright would say: “I'd like to say this.” In her work Norman powerfully and profoundly dramatizes “conversations people have, or would like to have, but don't for fear of what would happen if they did” (Brustein interview, pp. 1, 4). Getting Out, Third and Oak: The Laundromat, 'night, Mother, and Traveler in the Dark reflect Norman's continuing concern with mother-child relationships, autonomy, and paths to self. Examined chronologically, these four plays manifest an impressive development of thought and technique.

Pressed by interviewers for influences on her drama, Norman cites several: her oppressive childhood, the plays of Sophocles, Plato's allegory of the cave, and her southern heritage. But Norman is the first to acknowledge that she had no intention of becoming a playwright, having neither role model nor encouragement. She attended a conservative Presbyterian school for women, Agnes Scott College, on a scholarship, majoring in philosophy, still one of her primary interests. While an undergraduate she worked as a volunteer in the pediatric burn unit of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, the first of several intimate exposures to life-and-death situations. Returning to Louisville after graduation, Norman worked with severely disturbed children at Central State Hospital. Both experiences deepened a sensitivity to pain already evident in the high school student who won her first literary prize for an essay entitled “Why Do Good Men Suffer.” Norman began her playwriting career in 1976 when she was commissioned by Jon Jory, producing director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, to write a play for the theater's festival of new plays. Getting Out, a hard-hitting, shocking drama about a convicted murderer, was a huge success. Subsequently produced at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the Theatre de Lys in New York (where it ran for 237 performances), Getting Out was cited by the American Theatre Critics Association as an outstanding new play, won the George Oppenheimer Award, and earned the playwright the Outer Critics' Award for the best new playwright.

The central figure of Getting Out is in fact two characters: Arlene, a newly rehabilitated born-again Christian, and Arlie, her “unpredictable and incorrigible” younger self (p. 6). Largely based upon a severely disturbed girl at Central State Hospital, one the playwright remembers as “a kid who was so violent and vicious that people would get bruises when she walked in a room,” Arlie is Arlene's memory of herself (Gussow, p. 34). So out of touch are Arlie/Arlene that they appear to be different people. Getting Out gains intensity from a confined setting, a cell-like one-room apartment with bars on the windows, in which Arlene's emotional and physical entrapment are reflected through volatile conversations with her mother, her former pimp, Carl, a retired prison guard, Bennie, and Arlie—all of whom want something from her. The authenticity of the dialogue and the broad range of emotions add credibility to Arlene's struggle to be free of her prison walls and her past.

Destructive by nature, Arlie has been known to pee in her mother's shoes, make bologna and toothpaste sandwiches for her father, and fling a neighbor's pet frogs into the street just to see them go “SPLAT.” Relating this memorable event, Arlie recalls:

Some of em hit cars goin by but most of em jus got squashed, you know, runned over? It was great, seein how far we could throw em, over back of our backs an under our legs an God, it was really fun watchin em fly through the air … all over somebody's car window or somethin. … I never had so much fun in my whole life.

(p. 10)

Much of Arlie's life has been spent in reform and correctional institutions—Lakewood State Prison for forgery and prostitution and Pine Ridge Correctional Institute for the second-degree murder of a cabdriver in conjunction with a filling-station robbery. Her years of imprisonment have made her suspicious and guarded; her first hours of freedom are both tentative and terrifying, hopeful and disheartening. For Norman the issues of past, future, helplessness, and control are inextricably linked to how a person perceives herself. The relationship between mother and daughter is crucial and “predictive of how that daughter will experience herself, not only in relationship to her mother, but in relationship to the world” (Stone, p. 59). At the basis of that relationship is betrayal. Mothers in Norman's early plays provide neither protection nor guidance; they do not nourish with food or love. As early as her first play, Getting Out, the mother figure is an archetypal “bad” mother, cold and rejecting. On the day that Arlene is released from prison, her mother comes ostensibly to welcome her home—there has been no communication for eight years—but Arlene's attempts at reunion and reconciliation are rebuffed:

ARLENE:
I didn't know if you'd come.
MOTHER:
Ain't I always?
ARLENE:
How are you? (Moves as if to hug her. Mother stands still, Arlene backs off.)
MOTHER:
Bout the same. (Walking into room.)
ARLENE:
I'm glad to see you.

(p. 18)

Neither looking at Arlene nor responding to her comment, the mother dispassionately replies, “You look tired.” Arlene has no doubt about her rejection.

While her mother appears generous by bringing Arlene colored towels, a teapot, and a bedspread to make the apartment more homey, her superficial warmth cools when the conversation turns to Joey, the son Arlene had to surrender while in prison. Anxious for news of him, Arlene is angry and hurt to learn that her mother has treated her young son as she has treated Arlene, with coldness and contempt. In retaliation for Arlene's criticism of her, Mother viciously attacks Arlene where she is most vulnerable: her appearance, her character, and her competence as a mother. Maliciously squashing Arlene's dream of having Joey live with her—as Arlie maliciously squashed the frogs—Mother wins this round of their ongoing battle with a spiteful quip: “Fat chance” (p. 21).

They join in making the bed, but the uneasy peace between them does not last for long. While energetically scrubbing the filthy apartment, Mother renews her attack. Hardened to her mother's criticism and desperately in need of her mother's kindness, Arlene does not rise to the challenge. Instead, she asks tentatively, “Maybe I could come out on Sunday for … you still make pot roast?” In the moment that it takes us to realize that an invitation home has not been forthcoming and that Arlene cannot even articulate and complete the request, Mother's curt response unequivocally communicates the rejection: “Sunday … is my day to clean house now” (p. 25). In that one word now Norman conveys how much the world has changed in Arlene's absence. Toting her cleaning agents, bug spray, and linens and scrubbing with great vigor, Mother metaphorically implies her desires to sanitize Arlene. But Arlie/Arlene is soiled beyond any whitewashing; certainly, she is not suitable to bring home while there are two children there she might contaminate.

Conflicting emotions of caring and betrayal erupt with Mother's discovery of Bennie's hat hidden under the bed. Screaming that she should not have come and that Arlene has not changed from the filthy “whore” she was, Mother furiously strips her bedspread from the bed, stuffs it into her basket, and heads for the door. Years of their relationship are telescoped in this moment. “Don't you touch me,” hisses Mother as Arlene struggles with the murderous Arlie within: “No! Don't you touch Mama, Arlie. … No, don't touch Mama, Arlie. Cause you might slit Mama's throat” (p. 30-31). Clearly, Arlene's ambivalent feelings for her mother do not stem from tonight's encounter but from years of betrayals and rejections, not the least of which is Mother's lack of intervention and protection when, as a child, Arlene was sexually assaulted by her own father. Rather than fully developed characters, men in Getting Out are symbols of abuse and authority. Her father, the school principal, the prison guard, Bennie, her pimp, Carl, and the cabdriver Arlie killed because he tried “to mess with” her collectively represent a threat to Arlene's survival and are responsible, at least in part, for her self-abusive behavior. Bennie, who has retired from Pine Ridge with the expectation of taking care of and moving in on Arlene, is a surrogate father. And if Arlene understands his motivations for driving her home from prison, setting up her apartment, running her a hot bath, and going out for fried chicken, she does not fully acknowledge his intentions until he grabs her and pins her on the bed. Sensing that she is trapped, Arlene (with Arlie turning on now) screams, “I'll kill you, you creep!” (p. 38). Despite her violent and powerful kicks, it is only by calling Bennie a rapist (which injures his pride and loosens his grip) that Arlene is able to break free.

But Arlene cannot break free of Carl so easily. His intrusion into her privacy and psychic space is far more insidious: he has been her pimp, with all the attendant implications of care and abuse that this implies. He is the reason she went to Lakewood Prison for forgery; he has fathered Joey. When Carl forces his way into Arlene's apartment, rummages in her purse and her trunk, the sexual imagery is subtle but intentional. Having made plans for them both, Carl once again threatens to overpower her:

CARL:
… We be takin our feet to the New York streets. (As though she will be pleased.) No more fuckin' around with these jive-ass turkeys. We're going to the big city, baby. Get you some red shades and some red shorts an the john's be linin' up fore we hit town. Four tricks a night.

(p. 32)

Norman effectively counters Carl's inviting proposition with Arlie's memories of droolers slobbering all over her, crazy drunks, and “sickos” tying her to the bed. Invading her mind as he is invading her stash of groceries, Carl struggles to shake Arlene, his meal ticket, from her resolve to go straight. Speaking on a level that she clearly understands, Carl says, “You come with me an you'll have money. You stay here, you won't have shit” (p. 56). When rejected by reformed Arlene, Carl, like Bennie, tries to overpower her physically, literally and figuratively putting on the squeeze. Norman's message is unmistakable: women can be autonomous only when they are free from such intimidation.

In the concluding moments of Getting Out, Norman offers the possibility of hope to a struggling Arlene in the character of Ruby, a benevolent mother surrogate who is sharply contrasted with Arlene's own mother. An ex-con who lives in the same building and who scrapes out a respectable living as a cook, Ruby offers friendship and an example of behavior that may help Arlene find her own path to survival. Although Arlene is not yet ready to relinquish her illusions about freedom, Ruby gives her the advice that may pull her through this crisis: the sooner Arlene accepts how difficult it will be to be “outside,” the better off she will be. This confidence, the first of many confessions in Norman's plays, establishes trust between two women. Arlene returns the trust by confessing her most brutal act, the murder of Arlie in prison. Convinced that it was Arlie who was making her evil, Arlene repeatedly stabbed herself with a fork, crying: “Arlie is dead for what she done to me, Arlie is dead an it's God's will” (p. 61). While Arlene weeps for her lost self, Ruby rocks her like a baby, smoothes her hair, and rubs her back, giving Arlene the warmth she so desperately needs. Norman maintains that Arlene can only survive if she accepts the killer Arlie, accepts her past, and builds a future on that acceptance (Stone, p. 58). As the play concludes, the two women make plans to play cards together later that evening. There is little doubt the playwright is betting on Arlie/Arlene's survival.

Written in 1978 while Norman was playwright-in-residence at the Actors Theatre, Third and Oak: The Laundromat is a minimalist gem. Confined to one act, one hour, one setting, and two women, the play quietly exposes the personal crises of ordinary people. Relying heavily on two types of silence, a character who is reticent and one who is loquacious but has repressed emotions, Norman dramatizes the thematic concerns of her first play. But here the tone is softer, the symbolism of confinement less obvious, the mother-daughter relationship more subtly realized, and the humor more poignant and pervasive. In this play Norman demonstrates the same ear for dialogue authentic to social status and psychological state that characterized Getting Out. But by stripping away the “razzmatazz” (Norman's term) of Getting Out, the playwright delicately paints a more convincing portrait of emotional paralysis.

In Third and Oak two strangers meet by chance in the laundromat at the unusual hour of 3:00 A.M. Alberta, a refined woman, retired teacher, and recent widow, has planned the trip to the laundromat in the middle of the night to wash her dead husband's shirts in privacy. Deedee, a boisterous young woman, has run impetuously to the laundromat to escape the loneliness of her apartment. While waiting for the wash to finish and for a light to come on in Deedee's apartment (indicating the return of her profligate husband), Deedee and Alberta pass the time talking. A prominent clock underscores the passage of time.

The opening moments of the play are vaguely reminiscent of Edward Albee's Zoo Story, where a talkative stranger intrudes upon the privacy of another and forces conversation. In Third and Oak the crude and clumsy Deedee comically makes her presence known by backing into the laundromat, tripping over a wastebasket, and falling into her laundry as it spills out of her arms all around her. Reluctantly, Alberta initiates polite conversation, but excepts to avoid further communication by retreating into a magazine. While understanding Alberta's implicit message of rejection, Deedee nonetheless attempts to engage the older woman in conversation. After Alberta's initial coolness, their aimless conversation about doing the wash, the seven dwarfs, dead rabbits, late-night radio, and their respective marriages increasingly becomes more honest and intimate. Masterfully, Norman directs attention to the topic of infidelity that is gripping Deedee. Their mutual confessions—made credible because of the lateness of the hour, Deedee's childlike frankness, and her overwhelming need to talk—bring them closer to an awareness of their entrapment in lies: Deedee's that she can continue to deny her husband's infidelity and her loneliness, Alberta's that she can continue to deny the reality of her husband's death. Each woman helps the other face her crisis and find options for survival.

Repeating the paradigm employed in Getting Out, Norman provides us with two mothers: an indifferent, critical mother and a mother surrogate. Deedee depends on her mother—but the mother disappoints her, just as Deedee is a disappointment to her mother. “She don't ever say how she like seeing me,” Deedee tells Alberta, “but she holds back, you know.” Rationalizing their lack of communication, Deedee explains: “I mean, there's stuff you don't have to say when it's family,” but obviously she doesn't believe this herself (p. 7). Deedee's brief references to her mother implicitly convey all that she leaves unsaid. There is not much nurturing: her mother even charges her for soap. As anxious for her mother's approval as Arlene is for hers, Deedee confides in Alberta: “I wish Mom were more like you. … Smart. Nice to talk to” (p. 20). Norman believes that daughters have been betrayed by mothers with the false promise that they will find “a nice man” and that their lives will be “wonderful” (Stone, p. 59). Deedee has found a man, but he is in her words “a sonavabitch.” If Joe were home, she “wouldn't have to be here in this crappy laundromat washing fuckin' shirts in the middle of the night!” (p. 16). Dirty shirts in Third and Oak carry metaphoric and thematic importance. Joe's shirts, which earlier in the evening came tumbling out of her arms, continually remind Deedee of the “mess” her marriage is in. Joe is unfaithful. “Waitin' and waitin' in my nightgown,” she admits, “I grabbed up all these clothes, dirty or not, and got outta there so he wouldn't come in and find me cryin'. … Well, (Firmly). I wasn't cryin'” (p. 19). Deedee is a picture of pain and confusion. Married for only two years, she loves Joe and is sexually attracted to him; she is unwilling to admit to her mother or to herself her mistake in marrying him. As her anger at being his maid and whore swells and the agony of his indifference and unfaithfulness intensifies, Deedee wants to hurt Joe, just short of confronting him with the truth. She knows that if she asks how long it will be before he stops coming home at all:

… he'll say what do you mean don't come home at all and I'll have to tell him I know what you're doing, I know you're lying to me and going out on me and he'll say what are you gonna do about it. You want a divorce? And I don't want him to say that.

(p. 21)

Like Bennie and Carl in Getting Out, Joe abuses Deedee with the promise of caring and the threat of intimidation.

While Deedee may be able to analyze her options and speak rationally about her marital situation with Alberta, what she feels is not rational at all. With Deedee's hilarious, heartbreaking expression of pent-up animosity, Norman breaks the tension and freezes the moment: “I hope he gets his shirt caught in his zipper. I hope he wore socks with holes in 'em. I hope his Right Guard gives out. I hope his baseball cap falls in the toilet. I hope she kills him” (p. 22). Although Alberta is shocked, Deedee is not ashamed of her feelings. Norman allows her to verbalize the unsayable in her own vernacular; the outpouring of suppressed emotion releases her from the deception she has been living. But she is not yet prepared to take the next step toward survival. Alberta encourages her to use her anger to break free of pain, paralysis, and Joe; Deedee has yet to understand that she does not have to accept a marriage in which she settles for so little. Earlier in the evening Deedee was able to name only six of the seven dwarfs; she had completely forgotten the name of Happy.

Deedee proves to be a surprisingly attentive and compassionate listener. Touched by Deedee's courage, Alberta confesses that her husband died months ago; she has been unable to let go of Herb or face the future alone. Finally, she has relinquished his dirty shirts, although she still cannot wash the one he died in. Unlike Deedee, who sees Joe's shirts as a symbol of the dirty sex he soiled their marriage with, Alberta views Herb's dirty shirts as his only tangible remains. As Alberta relates the precise details of Herb's death, she embarrasses herself and Deedee with the astonishing admission: “I found our beachball when I was cleaning out our basement. I can't let the air out of it. It's his breath in there” (p. 24). Jon Jory, artistic director of the Actors Theatre, calls this “matchless Marsha Norman.” The remark eloquently captures the essence of loss. Mel Gussow said you could hear a collective sigh from the audience (pp. 34-35). With an effective but nearly imperceptible reversal from the opening moments of the play, Norman concludes with a tableau: Alberta leaves Deedee alone in the laundromat drinking a Dr. Pepper and enjoying the pleasures of solitude, probably for the first time. The light has come on in her apartment, but Deedee is in no rush to go home.

The dramatic formula of two characters, an evening of painful confessions, confined space and time, symphonic structure, and pointed tableau that Norman has utilized in Third and Oak anticipates the design of 'night, Mother. Whereas Third and Oak offers Deedee and Alberta a way out of deception and a way in to self, 'night, Mother will consider the question of whether suicide is the way out or the way in.

After the success of Getting Out and Third and Oak, Norman's Circus Valentine was a dismal failure. Her subsequent plays were far more successful: The Holdup, a sympathetic look at the Old West and its collision with the twentieth century, was produced at the Circle Repertory Company in New York and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco; 'night, Mother, her fifth play, premiered in December 1982 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the direction of Tom Moore. Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in drama, 'night, Mother relentlessly dramatizes Jessie Cates' attempts to rationalize her suicide and her mother, Thelma's, attempts to forestall it. A middle-aged epileptic living with her mother since her husband left her, Jessie has only recently gained an awareness of the extent of her unhappiness. Her decision reflects her need to control what her epilepsy so aptly symbolizes: life out of control. For several months Jessie has been planning what she terms “the other thing I'm trying” (p. 75). The private night of conversation we witness is a necessary prelude to suicide, bringing together and tearing apart a mother and daughter whose relationship has been more intimate in name than in fact. Building to an inevitable conclusion, 'night, Mother faces the issues of bonding, separation, and self with uncompromising honesty.

With a play stripped bare to one setting, one act, and two characters, Norman establishes familiarity by using a realistic set and colloquial speech—and then strips familiarity away. From the moment Jessie, efficiently collecting rubber sheets, towels, newspapers, and her father's gun, announces her intention to kill herself, Thelma, casually taking stock of dwindling Hershey bars and peanut brittle, encounters an unfamiliar, terrifying reality. The contrastive nature of the play is immediately apparent. Spare but lyrical dialogue is simultaneously trivial and profound, recognizable and bizarre, caring and hostile. The subject shifts from garbage pickup to jealousy, from extension cords to disappointing marriages, from Christmas lists to epileptic fits with unsettling authenticity. Language is used both as weapon and defense mechanism: what Jessie does not want to hear, she ignores; what Thelma hears, she attempts to rationalize. Paralleling Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, Jessie and Thelma are respectively reticent and communicative, kinetic and quiescent.

As their battle of wills and wits ensues, Jessie profits from the element of surprise, psychological advantage, and extensive preparation, but Thelma proves a formidable opponent. Armed with reason, ridicule, threats, bribes, diversionary tactics (including making cocoa which both hate), sheer will, and physical confrontation, Thelma struggles to gain control of the situation and of Jessie. Instead of the usual television programs and manicure, Jessie has planned an agenda for this evening; the momentum and timetable are hers. Although unprepared, Thelma attempts a number of responses to the unacceptable pronouncement that her daughter intends to commit suicide. At first Thelma considers calling her son, Dawson, to disarm Jessie. Then thinking Jessie ill, she considers calling the doctor or an ambulance. Increasingly frustrated by her ineffectiveness, Thelma ridicules her daughter's competence, as Arlene's mother did in Getting Out and Deedee's mother did in Third and Oak.

You'll miss. … You'll just wind up a vegetable. How would you like that? Shoot your ear off? … You'll cock the pistol and have a fit.

(p. 17)

Her ridicule elicits no response; in fact, confused by Jessie's control, Thelma wonders if Jessie isn't just frightening her. Jessie's laugh warns Thelma of her seriousness, and she tries another approach. “It's a sin,” she warns. “You'll go to hell” (p. 18). Again Jessie is undeterred. By the time Jessie loads the gun, Thelma, in stark contrast to Jessie, is hysterical. Her outburst would be funny but for the seriousness of the moment and the anxiety it reveals:

You can't use my towels. … And you can't use your father's gun, either. … And you can't do it in my house.

(p. 19)

With two clocks prominently displaying the passage of time, Thelma pleads for more time and more talk. Her efforts at playing psychiatrist, however, are unsuccessful; Jessie is interested in neither reevaluating her decision nor laying blame. Rather, she is committed to impressing upon Thelma that she is utterly without hope:

I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I am tired. I'm sad. I feel used.

(p. 28)

With humor and pathos Norman develops an intimacy and honesty never before shared. The night of conversation becomes one of confession as both women admit their failures and jealousies. As in Getting Out and Third and Oak, men have been sources of pain and disappointment. Thelma's husband was indifferent and Jessie's has deserted her. Jessie's brother, Dawson, is selfish and cruel and her son, Ricky, is a drug addict and petty thief. But it is Thelma's secrecy about Jessie's epilepsy that is the focus of this conversation. Jessie had been told that her first epileptic fit was the result of falling off a horse. In her efforts to protect Jessie and to deny her own shame and guilt, Thelma has not told anyone, not even Jessie's father, that she was born an epileptic. Thinking the epilepsy a punishment for not loving Jessie's father or wanting more children, Thelma concludes that “it has to be something I did … I don't know what I did, but I did it, I know” (pp. 71-72).

Thelma's confession evokes an anguished debate about bonding and separation, autonomy and control. Exasperated at the necessity of having to explain her need for separation to her mother after a long evening of explanations, Jessie explodes, “It doesn't have anything to do with you!” (p. 72). In her portrayal of the daughter's need to break free and the mother's to maintain connection, Norman poignantly conveys the agony of a mother unable to help her daughter or let her go. “Everything you do has to do with me, Jessie,” she insists. “You can't do anything, wash your face or cut your finger, without doing it to me” (p. 72).

Indeed, suggests Jenny Spencer, “what Jessie ultimately demands from her mother seems both infantile and impossible: not only complete control over the evening, but her mother's unqualified love, undivided attention, unmitigated support, and, with it, at least collaboration in the suicide” (Spencer, p. 370). But if Jessie's intent this evening had also been to spare Thelma further suffering, she is unprepared for her mother's tenacity, fear, and the sheer enormity of her guilt. Their harrowing conversation reveals that for Thelma the little she has sustains her; for Jessie the little she has indicates all that she does not have. And what she does not have is Jessie:

It's somebody I lost … it's my own self. Who never was. Or who tried to be and never got there. Somebody I waited for who never came. And never will.

(p. 76)

Tearing herself away from Thelma's maternal and physical grip, Jessie slips away into the bedroom without the promised farewell kiss. Thelma's screams of protest and pain follow her; but literally cut off from Jessie she is powerless to stop her. Her body crumbles against the door as if she too had been shot, confirming her previous statement about mutually felt pain. The technique of a concluding shot is by no means unique: Ibsen used it in Hedda Gabler and Miller used it in Death of a Salesman. But Jessie is not interested in dying “beautifully” nor in leaving a life insurance payoff. What Jessie is interested in is having a say about her life, and she has decided to say no. In this “waiting” play we have been expecting and dreading this shot, yet like Thelma we are shocked by its reality and by Jessie's courage. Marsha Norman's compassion for the survivor and her sensitivity to the guilt she experiences is conveyed through Thelma's heart-wrenching apology: “Jessie, Jessie, child … Forgive me. (Pause) I thought you were mine” (p. 89). In an exquisitely prepared moment the bewildered, devastated mother, gripping a cocoa pot, mourns the daughter she could not save and never knew.

The cathartic power of 'night, Mother is tremendous. We are Thelma trying to understand, placate, compromise, escape guilt, rely on reason and logic, and deny death. And we are Jessie wanting freedom from suffering, fighting against vulnerability, affirming individual choice and dignity. “We identify with Jessie not in her decision to die, but on the level of fantasy and desire, with the symbolic fulfillment suicide comes to represent when played out before the mother” (Spencer, p. 372). “A great cleaning out of your pockets,” suggests the playwright, is what 'night, Mother is about (Christon, p. 1). In many ways 'night, Mother is the most Beckettian of Norman's plays. In his review of the London production, Benedict Nightingale observed that “one might defensibly see Jessie as a Beckett character who presses the logic of her predicament to a conclusion that her prototypes and counterparts inexplicably resist” (Nightingale, p. 38). Correspondences between this play and Waiting for Godot abound: the setting of one night in an isolated house on an isolated road; the use of the couple; absent characters made dramatically present; debilitating illness; conversation to pass the time while waiting; the subject of suicide; the issues of passivity, helplessness, and survival; the concluding tableau.

'night, Mother anticipates Traveler in the Dark, a play Norman concedes she could not have written earlier (“Playwright Marsha Norman,” p. 13). In this work, which premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in February 1984 under the direction of Tom Moore, the playwright turns her attention to a modern crisis of faith, a debate between science and religion. The central character, Sam, a world-famous cancer surgeon who has saved thousands of lives, operates on Mavis, his nurse and childhood sweetheart, and finds her riddled with cancer he failed to detect in time. Overcome by grief, shame, and disillusionment, Sam leaves Mavis dying, bolts from the hospital, and flees to his boyhood home convinced that his life is empty. Feeling abandoned and betrayed by everything he has believed in—medicine, the power of the intellect, and himself—Sam is unable to put his “rationality,” to use Norman's term, “against the face of death” (Christon, p. 1).

Traveler is beset by a number of weaknesses: the crisis seems too calculated; the dialogue is too often glib and unnatural; the wife and father are ill defined and one-dimensional; the reconciliation between father and son is artificial. Yet despite these problems, Norman has fashioned an intelligent play. She demonstrates her ability to extend insight into men that parallels her previously demonstrated insight into women (Henry, p. 101). Choosing a complex, eloquent character, a type she has previously avoided, Norman competently and convincingly portrays a man whose intellect cannot protect him from suffering. Since his mother's death, which occurred when Sam was twelve, he has rejected God and protected himself with a shield of logic. Mavis' imminent death triggers unresolved guilt concerning his mother's death; the shield shatters. As incapable of saving Mavis as Thelma was of saving Jessie, and similarly unprepared to cope with the death of a loved one, Sam, sick at heart, is thrust into a personal crisis. Norman elevates this play above the crisis of self explored in Getting Out, Third and Oak, and 'night, Mother to a higher philosophical plane. Traveler's subject may be traced to the playwright's personal experience. “I went through the same bitter rebellion Sam goes through in the play,” admits the playwright (Patriot Ledger, p. 13).

A logical progression from Jessie and Thelma's discussions on the quality of life and the reality of death, Traveler is a successor as well to Getting Out and Third and Oak. Norman employs a number of techniques used in the earlier plays: confined setting, focus on the moment of crisis, confession of secrets, bonding of mother and child, portraits of failed relationships, humor to underscore and mitigate pain, absent characters dramatically realized. Traveler varies a number of these elements. Instead of the “couple” developed in Third and Oak and 'night, Mother (and used initially in Getting Out in one-on-one conversations between Arlene and her mother, Arlene and Bennie, and Arlene and Carl), the play now considers several independent “couples.” There are two father-son relationships (Sam and his twelve-year-old son, Stephen, and Sam and his preacher father, Everett)² and two mother-son relationships (Stephen and Glory, Sam's wife, and Sam and his dead mother). Glory is compared to Sam's mother, Sam and Glory's marriage to that of his parents, and Sam's guilt and sense of insufficiency at the time of his mother's death to his guilt and impotence at Mavis'. Finally, there are two Sams, a young one, Stephen, exactly the same age Sam was when his mother died, and Sam, a middle-aged, self-destructive atheist in search of himself.

Having developed wise and caring mother surrogates in Getting Out and Third and Oak, Norman presents for the first time loving and supportive wives who are warm, affectionate mothers. Glory is a “lovely woman who,” in Norman's words, “takes enormous pleasure in the smallest moments of her life” (act 1, p. 2). Her generosity and love are demonstrated by a freezer full of Fudgsicles awaiting Mavis, a bountiful picnic basket for the family, demonstrative affection for Stephen, and seemingly endless patience with Sam. Similarly, Sam's mother is remembered as a woman of warmth, humor, talent, and great patience. Everett fondly recalls that his wife would bake a batch of cookies, eat every one of them, and send the waxed paper to the intended recipient with the message that as soon as she went off her diet she would send another. And Sam remembers her as “the gingerbread lady” who had:

Curly red hair and shiny round eyes and a big checked apron. Fat pink fingers and a sweet vanilla smell and all the time in the world. Sing to you, dance with you, write your name on the top of a cake.

(act 1, p. 41)

As if in a time capsule, the memory of the twelve-year-old Sam, complete with smells, is precisely recovered.

Additionally, Norman departs in this play from the paradigm of situating the action within the confining space of the room, choosing instead the more expansive but equally metaphoric setting of an overgrown garden at Sam's boyhood home, whose crumbling wall is held together only by a large stone goose. It was in this garden that Sam spent his fondest moments with his mother, reading fairy tales, singing songs, and discovering “witches fingers, dragon teeth and fallen stars” (act 1, p. 18). Evoking memories of Sam's youth, the garden, whose thematic importance becomes increasingly apparent, provides a credible setting for a long evening of conversation, confrontation, and confession. While Sam hides from the others the reason for Mavis' absence, he anxiously waits for and dreads (as we did the shot in 'night, Mother) the hospital's call confirming Mavis' death.

Seated on the crumbling wall reading an ancient copy of Mother Goose, Stephen is fascinated by a magical world where frogs turn into princes, houses are built without walls, and all the king's horses and all the king's men can put shattered eggs together again. Since his mother's death, Sam has rejected belief in magical tales, bringing up his son protected from lies, loss, and fairy tales, both Christian and Grimm's. The scientist and cynic knows that nothing can save Mavis. In fact, Sam's profane and savagely witty parody of God and the Bible provides some of the most biting observations in the play. God, suggests Sam, sets life up: “We live through it and He writes it down. What we know as civilization … is just God gathering material for another book” (act 1, p. 42). For Sam fairy tales dredge up painful memories of sitting by his mother's bed working puzzles and reading fairy tales in a vain effort to save her. Bitterly, he recalls the death of “the gingerbread lady”: “We didn't call it dying. … we said God was missing her something awful and she just went on back where she belonged” (act 1, p. 41). Even now Sam is still haunted by what he perceives as his failure and still angry at the betrayal of a mother who left him with his father, who cared more for his flock than for Sam, and a God who took away his mother. “Our own version of the past,” observes Norman, “as we are haunted by it, as we are held back by it, or in some way defined by it—is our own to escape or make sense of, or to triumph over, or to carry with us” (Stone, p. 58). Helpless to save Mavis, a devoted mother surrogate, Sam is overwhelmed by his past, his guilt, and his betrayal. “I can't save lives,” mourns Sam:

they're lost from the start. I can give them another trip to the dentist, maybe, another summer of reruns, maybe a flat tire for a little excitement on the road. But it's my victory, not theirs. My work saves my life. Or used to. Oh boy. Day after day, I've been real proud of myself 'cause I won one more round. Right? Wrong. Death wins. Death always wins.

(act 2, p. 21)

Anguished by what he can neither control nor understand, Sam resolves to take Stephen and leave behind Glory, his work, and his past. Sam's marriage to Glory has been strikingly similar to that of his parents. While Glory has been supportive, loving, and patient, Sam has been devoted more to patients than to family. Sam knows he must separate from Glory if he is to survive. Their argument over custody of Stephen deteriorates into a Strindbergian battle, more characteristic of Edward Albee than Norman, and is one of several times in this play that the playwright loses her natural voice. Sam's tirades are so caustic and abusive that he risks the continued sympathy of the audience. But Sam is able to regain this sympathy with his confession of frustration and weakness. His poignant admission of disappointment in marriage, in love, and in himself dramatically anticipates the admission of Sam's secret concerning Mavis' cancer. Sam has kept this secret from Glory and the others because he has been unwilling to concretize the thought. If he admits to Glory that Mavis is dying, then in his mind he is once again responsible for the death of a loved one. Sam must be able to accept his past and the present crisis and move beyond it or, as Norman has suggested, he will be unable to go on.

Sam is a pivotal character in three relationships. Through him Norman can focus upon the self trying to be a self in the context of husband, father, and son. Recalling men in previous Norman plays, Sam is abusive; his relationships are self-serving. His intellect, sharp tongue, and wit are lethal weapons. In his relationship with Everett, or what has passed for a relationship, Sam has harbored anger for thirty years, making Everett pay for his incompetence as a father and weakness as a man. Now, faced with the imminent death of Mavis, he runs home to ask Everett to preach at the funeral:

A man I despise, will please commend the spirit of a woman I never knew, to the everlasting arms of a God for whom I have nothing but contempt.

(act 2, p. 21)

Sam claims he does not understand his hypocritical behavior. Indeed, if he admits that he understands his motivation, then he must admit that he needs Everett and does not despise him. In his role as father, Sam appears to be loving, but in fact he is so self-absorbed that he does not even know Stephen's birthday. Selfishly, Sam has taken away Stephen's youth and dreams and replaced them with his own. When Sam plans to take Stephen away as his companion in crisis, he thinks little about the pain Stephen will experience being ripped away from his mother. If he understands his motivation in this plan, he might also have to face the fact that Mavis' death, recalling that of his mother, has prompted him to deprive Stephen of a mother's love. It is, however, as a husband that Sam is most abusive: he sees in Glory's goodness and love an opportunity to absolve himself of his failures. Sam need not be unfaithful to a woman (as Joe and Cecil had been in Third and Oak and 'night, Mother); his work has been his mistress. Thinking himself superior in intellect and accomplishment, Sam's relationship with Glory is one of habit rather than affection.

But the male character Norman has created in this drama is far too complex to dismiss as abusive in the tradition of Arlene's pimp and Deedee's husband. Sam's abusive behavior gives him the opportunity to distance himself from others, a shield against further loss and hurt. Sam claims that he is a person he does not want to know. We know him, however, and we can identify with his confusion, impotence, and vulnerability. Sam's return to his boyhood home is as much a search for self as it is for what Norman calls “a point of light in a universal sky” (Christon, p. 1). He has spent all of his adult life rejecting the God of his preacher father; but faced with the arbitrary assignment of pain and the daily occurrence of meaningless death, Sam wants there to be a God. And he does not want God to be him. Having reached this point of self-awareness, Sam, like previous Norman characters, can free himself from self-flagellation and begin the process of renewal.

To provide an opportunity for Sam and his father to be alone, Norman dispatches Glory and Stephen off to the hospital. If we find the reconciliation between father and son too artificial and the circumstances too convenient to be credible, we do believe that Sam finds in Everett a caring, wise listener who comforts him in his grief, just as Ruby consoled Arlene in Getting Out. The playwright, in fact, has remarked that she was “surprised with the warmth” of the preacher, given her fundamentalist background and her own rebellion (“Playwright Marsha Norman,” p. 13). But Everett is indeed warm and is finally able to do for his own son what he does best: comfort the suffering. With the stark intensity Norman achieved in 'night, Mother, the conclusion of Traveler in the Dark is simultaneously anguished and affirmative. Everett's prayer, symbolically delivered from atop the garden wall where Sam, and before him Stephen, had been seated, is eloquent in its simplicity. “Help thou our unbelief,” he prays, as Sam, still very much in the throes of crisis, goes to Green River, a traveler in the dark hoping God will find him.

Criticism of Traveler in the Dark reflects a growing recognition of Norman's maturity. William Henry suggests that in “debating the issues of science and faith, love and self-knowledge, the rage to grow and the resistance to change,” Norman has stretched herself beyond what he sarcastically refers to as “cocoa and marshmallows” (Henry, p. 101). And Jack Kroll agrees that Norman seems to be “a natural lightning rod” for the crises that continue to assault our faith and hope (Kroll, p. 76). As Norman creates more harrowing crises, a keen sense for the dramatic continues to be refined. Marsha Norman admits to her own crisis of faith, but continues to be driven by the conviction that from darkness comes understanding. Quoting the poet Theodore Roethke, the playwright maintains: “‘You learn by going where you have to go!’” But with the honesty we have come to expect from her, she adds, “More and more it seems like a journey with detours” (Gussow, p. 38). If Norman, like the rest of us, keeps going on, a traveler in the dark, she appears nevertheless to have a clear view of the artistic road she intends to follow. It is to write about why women—and men—suffer.

Notes

1. This quotation was chosen by Marsha Norman and the staff of the American Repertory Theatre to appear in the playbill for the premiere of 'night, Mother.

2. This is an example of Norman's linking her plays: Everett has just returned from a funeral he has preached where Thelma Cates has been in attendance.

Bibliography

Christon, Lawrence. “Norman Follows Her Star.” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1985, sec. 4, p. 1.

Gussow, Mel. “Women Playwrights: New Voices in the Theater.” New York Times Magazine, May 18, 1983, pp. 22＋.

Henry, William A. “Blasted Garden.” Review of Traveler in the Dark, by Marsha Norman. Time, February 27, 1984, p. 101.

Kroll, Jack. “Modern Crisis of Faith.” Review of Traveler in the Dark, by Marsha Norman. Newsweek, February 27, 1984, p. 76.

Moore, Tom. “Tom Moore Collaborates again with Marsha Norman.” Interview with Dana Persky. A.R.T. News, February 1984, pp. 2＋.

Nightingale, Benedict. “Or Not To Be.” Review of 'night, Mother, by Marsha Norman. Canadian Forum, April 1985, p. 38.

Norman, Marsha. “An Interview with Marsha Norman.” With Sherilyn Beard. Southern California Anthology. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1985.

———. Getting Out. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978.

———. “Marsha Norman Discusses Playwriting with Robert Brustein.” A.R.T. News, February 1984, pp. 1＋.

———. 'night, Mother. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

———. Third and Oak: The Laundromat. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978.

———. Traveler in the Dark. Original typescript produced at American Repertory Theatre, 1983.

Pinter, Harold. “Between the Lines.” Sunday Times [London], March 4, 1962, p. 25.

“Playwright Marsha Norman—a Talent for Listening.” Patriot Ledger, February 7, 1984, pp. 13＋.

Spencer, Jenny S. “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity.” Modern Drama 30, no. 3 (September 1987), 364-75.

Stone, Elizabeth. “Playwright Marsha Norman: An Optimist Writes about Suicide, Confinement and Despair.” Ms, July 12, 1983, pp. 56-59.