SOURCE: Bitonti, Tracy Simmons. “More than Noises Off: Marsha Norman's Offstage Characters.” In Shaw and Other Matters, edited by Susan Rusinko, pp. 166-79. London: Associated University Presses, 1998.

In a 1983 New York Times article, drama critic Mel Gussow celebrated the increasing numbers of new women dramatists emerging in a theater that had previously been “a male preserve.”¹ Among the women gaining recognition for their playwriting talents were Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and, especially, Marsha Norman. Norman's drama career began in 1977 with Getting Out, and in 1983, she won a Pulitzer Prize for 'night, Mother. A 1988 volume, Four Plays, made more easily available not only Getting Out but also the two one acts that make up Third and Oak (1978); The Holdup (1980-83); and Traveler in the Dark (1984).²

Much of the critical attention to Norman's plays thus far has taken a feminist approach, since much of her work deals with women's experiences and concerns. A few scholars have focused on particular elements of Norman's dramatic technique. Lisa J. McDonnell compares and contrasts the work of Norman and Beth Henley, focusing on their most distinctive narrative methods.³

Leslie Kane traces “an impressive development of thought and technique” in Norman's plays, discussing hallmarks such as a confined setting, bonding of mother and child, and uses of humor. One element Kane touches on that could be explored further is Norman's use of “absent characters dramatically realized.”⁴ There have been many notable examples in theater history of characters who never appear, yet who influence a play's action—e.g., Captain Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts and Tom and Laura Wingfield's father in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. But there have been few playwrights who use this technique as consistently as does Norman.

The offstage character is an important device in drama because of the necessary economies of the stage. In fact, the main reason Norman's 1987 novel, The Fortune Teller, became a novel instead of a play was that Norman “realized that she would not have enough room onstage for all the characters.”⁵ In a novel there is more room for memory and flashback, and Norman could show scenes with characters such as protagonist Fay's ex-husband Ed, or Colleen Masters, a catalyst of the novel's action. The offstage character is a way to compensate for the lack of such room in drama. Esther Harriot has praised Norman's ability to make the most of the theater's limitations, pointing out her use of confined space, tight structure, and economy of language.⁶ Norman's uses of offstage characters are another element of this skill. The technique has another practical advantage: fewer onstage characters means fewer actors who must be paid, and production costs must be taken into consideration.

Offstage characters can serve the same kinds of functions that McDonnell attributes to the narrative technique of characters' storytelling: they can influence or reveal something about onstage characters or serve as foils, affect the plot, provide comic relief or moments of pathos, or reflect the play's themes (McDonnell, 96, 98). Norman incorporates each of these uses to varying degrees. The Holdup relies the least upon offstage characters, who are simply onstage character enhancers. In Getting Out and 'night, Mother, they are influences and foils, with touches of humor in the latter play. In Third and Oak and Traveler in the Dark, the offstage characters are the primary plot catalysts.

Norman was using this technique from the start of her career. Getting Out simultaneously depicts Arlene Holsclaw's efforts to adjust to life after prison and dramatizes the process that had led her there. Norman uses the experimental technique of having two actresses play the same character at different points in her career; on one part of the stage, Arlene struggles to establish her independence and maturity, while on another part of the stage, Arlie, her younger and wilder self, reenacts important scenes from her life. Although these scenes do feature a few of the people who influenced Arlie, such as a school principal and generic prison guards, some of the most important characters remain unseen.

One of these offstage characters is Arlie's father, who has sexually abused her. She lies to her mother (“Daddy didn't do nuthin' to me,” 16), indicates that abuse has occurred more than once (“don't touch it. It'll git well. It git well before,” 15), and screams in terror (“No, Daddy! I didn't tell her nuthin'. I didn't! I didn't!” 17). The school principal catches her with money, which Arlie claims she earned “doin' things” for her daddy (17), yet she is later enraged by (and beats up) a fellow juvenile hall inmate who accuses her of sleeping with her father for money (23). This combination of sex and money helped lead her into prostitution, and the combined negative sexual experiences most likely contributed to her worst crime: she shot a cab driver who apparently was sexually harassing her after she told him not to touch her.

The characterization of the offstage father is continued in Arlene's mother's denial of the abuse. She says, “He weren't a mean man, though, your daddy” (15), and remembers Arlie's “tellin' them lies about that campin' trip we took, sayin' your daddy made you watch while he an me … you know. I'd have killed you then if them social workers hadn't been watchin” (21). She tells Arlene that he claims to be dying and that he has not worked for six or seven years, making her drive the cab that supports them instead. She also recalls an incident in which little Arlie tried to kill her drunken father by bringing him a sandwich of bologna and toothpaste—and the stage directions indicate that for the first time Arlene is “finally enjoying a memory” (19), as she does at the end of the play remembering the time she was locked in the closet and peed in every one of her mother's shoes (56).

Another offstage character who is important in the development of Arlene's character is the prison chaplain. As Esther Harriot points out, he was the first person to call Arlie by her full name and to treat her as a human being, thus beginning the process of the transformation from Arlie to Arlene (Harriot, 131). Bennie, the former guard who has driven Arlene home to Kentucky in the hopes of continuing and advancing his voyeuristic relationship with her, is envious of the chaplain. Arlene quotes the chaplain, indicating his influence: “Animals is wild, not people. That's what he said.” Bennie responds, “Now what could that four-eyes chaplain know about wild?” (9). When she unpacks the picture of Jesus the chaplain had given her, Bennie snidely remarks, “He got it for free, I bet” (10). Bennie, like the other men in the play, wants to exploit Arlene sexually, whereas the chaplain had shown her nothing but kindness.

Arlie initially resists the chaplain's visit, but soon is anxiously inquiring whether it is his day to visit. She is later devastated when he is transferred. He gives her a Bible with her name “right in the front of it,” and her reading from it is an important part of her rehabilitation (46). Moreover, he had told her that Arlie was her evil self which God would take away so that she could be good. When he left, she became hysterical and stabbed herself repeatedly with a fork in an attempt to kill “Arlie” (53). This incident was the key to her transformation. Recalling it to her new friend, Ruby, helps Arlene to complete the process, to grieve for and finally recognize the lost part of herself (Harriot, 134).

A third key offstage character is Arlene's son, Joey, named for the yellow “Joey-bear” that was her security as a child. Arlie had wanted to be pregnant; she falsely told the doctor at a juvenile institution that she was, saying that “kids need somebody to bring 'em up right” (22). When she did become pregnant with Joey, she resisted institutional pressures to have an abortion. Pregnant Arlie's touching speech to her baby as she imagines him reveals both the defeatist attitude her experiences have given her and her desire to protect him:

Best thing you to be is stay a baby 'cause nobody beats up on babies or puts them. … (Much more quiet) that ain't true, baby. People is mean to babies, so you stay right here with me so nobody kin git you an make you cry an they lay one finger on you (Hostile) an I'll beat the screamin' shit right out of 'em. They even blow on you an I'll kill 'em.

(30)

Joey was the reason she had broken out: “I guess I just went crazy after [they took him away]. Thought if I could jus' git out an find him …” (30).

Arlene's main goal now that she is out of prison is to have Joey with her; she repeats this hope to her mother and to Carl, her former pimp. Her mother scoffs and does her best to puncture this hope. Arlene practically has to beg her mother for details of the glimpse that the latter had of Joey two years previously. When her mother callously says that Joey “got your stringy hair” (16), Arlene clings to this bit of information, returning to it in their conversation and transforming it when she later says to Bennie, “[Mother] says Joey's a real good-lookin' kid” (29).

Carl reacts to Arlene's hopes in a different way: he uses Joey as a tool for manipulation and emotional blackmail. He tries to persuade her to come to New York with him and take up prostitution again by telling her what she could give Joey:

If you was a kid, would you want your mom to git so dragged out washin' dishes she don't have no time for you an no money to spend on you? You come with me, you kin send him big orange bears an Sting-Ray bikes with his name wrote on the fenders. He'll like that. … Joey be tellin' all his friends 'bout his mom livin' up in New York City an bein' so rich an sendin' him stuff all the time.

(49)

Lisa McDonnell calls this “the strongest temptation of all,” indicating that Arlene's resistance to it helps her regain her dignity (McDonnell, 102). Although Joey never appears, his existence reveals something about the characters of Arlene, her mother, and Carl.

Whereas the male offstage characters all have some kind of influence on Arlie/Arlene, the females—Arlene's sisters, Candy and June—are foils for Arlene, representing alternative paths she could have chosen. Like the male characters, they also add to the depiction of onstage characters. Candy is the previous tenant of the dirty, cramped apartment Arlene is moving into. Her upstairs neighbor, Ruby, reveals that Candy left owing her needed money and that she was slovenly, using an empty can of Raid to hit the bugs. Arlene's mother says that Candy has been “screwin' since day one” (20), and Ruby confirms that Candy has returned to a pimp. Arlene responds angrily: “No, it ain't okay. Guys got their dirty fingernails all over her. Some pimp's out buyin' green pants while she … Goddamn her” (41). Arlene rejects this lifestyle, just as she has rejected the option represented by June, who is not only married to a jailbird and constantly pregnant like her mother but also a dope dealer.

Discussion of Candy and June also illustrates the callousness of Arlene's family's relationships. When Arlene first asks her mother where Candy is, her mother responds, “You got her place so what do you care? I got her outta my house so whatta I care?” (15). Esther Harriot points out that when Ruby says to Arlene, “Candy said you was in Arkansas,” and Arlene responds, “Alabama” (41), it is a good “illustration of her family's indifference,” because “all that Candy can remember of her sister's whereabouts is the first letter of the state” (Harriot, 134).

In Norman's next plays, the one-acts The Laundromat and The Pool Hall, which combine to form Third and Oak, the offstage characters are the main catalysts for the onstage action (or, more accurately, discussion). Two lonely women who define themselves in relation to their offstage husbands⁷ come together at a very late hour in The Laundromat. Deedee, a talkative young woman, is upset about her husband, Joe, who is cheating on her. Alberta's husband, Herb, is dead, and she is finally bringing herself to do the laundry he left behind. Through the women's conversation, their husbands are extensively characterized. Joe is lazy and has a cruel streak. Deedee says he does not laugh when she makes a joke but would if she tripped over the coffee table (61). Deedee also admits that “Joe hates black people. He says even when they're dancin' or playin' ball, they're thinkin' about killin'” (74); and this comes just after she has chastised Alberta for being prejudiced.

Herb, by contrast, appears as a gentle man. He called his wife “Bertie, my girl” and enjoyed watching her cook Thanksgiving dinners (although this made her nervous). He liked to garden and would fetch and wipe off a lawn chair so that Alberta could come out and watch him in the sunshine. He had a sense of humor, putting out an “Herb Garden” sign and joking, “Can't we wait until it's old enough to walk?” to Alberta's request to take out the garbage (78). Norman's wealth of vivid details makes these characters almost as interesting and “real” as the ones onstage.

Both of the men have a great deal of power over their wives. Joe does not want Deedee to work, so she has to hide the menial job she has taken. Joe is not ready for children, so Deedee cannot have any yet. Most importantly, Deedee is well aware that Joe is “mean and stupid” and that he is unfaithful, but she does not want a divorce (76-77). Even though Herb is dead, he influences Alberta: she tells Deedee, “I found our beachball when I cleaned out the basement. I can't let the air out of it. It's his breath in there” (79). She continues to match his black socks even though she realizes she no longer has to, and she has kept his clothes, even the shirt he died in. Although the source of Herb's continued power is love, unlike Joe's, both men have left their wives facing loneliness. Alberta is learning to deal with it—she is at least able to wash most of the laundry—and she encourages Deedee to do the same.

Two minor offstage characters are worth noting in this play. One is Deedee's mother—as Leslie Kane points out, “Repeating the paradigm employed in Getting Out [with Arlene's mother and Ruby], Norman provides us with two mothers: an indifferent, critical mother and a mother surrogate” (Kane, 262). Deedee usually takes her laundry to her mother's house: “She got matching Maytags. She buys giant-sized Cheer and we sit around and watch the soaps till the clothes come out” (61). But the detergent is the only “cheer” in the house; Deedee reports that her mother does not want to talk to Deedee, saying, “Just leave 'em, I'll do 'em” (61), because she does not believe Deedee is capable of setting the dryer heat properly. Deedee tells Alberta that her (Deedee's) mother is the last person she would talk to about her troubles, but Deedee can confide in Alberta.

The other minor offstage character is Alberta's Aunt Dora. Alberta tells Deedee that she has not cried since Aunt Dora's rabbit Puffer died. When he died, Aunt Dora admonished her not to cry: “He didn't mean to go and leave us all alone and he'd feel bad if he knew he made us so miserable” (75). Aunt Dora did not follow her own advice, eventually lapsing into silence and dying in a nursing home. Norman implies that Alberta will not follow in Aunt Dora's footsteps.

The Pool Hall also revolves around offstage characters. Like Deedee, Shooter Stevens, a black DJ, is in a troubled marriage. He has come to talk things out with Willie, the owner of the pool hall and the best friend of Shooter's father (the original Shooter Stevens, a pool hustler). Shooter's wife Sondra, his father-in-law George (his father's and Willie's other best friend), and his father not only are the catalysts for the discussion but also expand the characterizations of Shooter and Willie.

Shooter's marriage is one of the main topics of their conversations. He indicates his resentment of Sondra almost immediately. Informed by Willie that she has just called, Shooter replies, “Somebody did one helluva job teaching that girl to tell the time. Tells me the time to come home, tells me the time to eat, tells me the time to go to bed” (82). Shooter is even more angry about her spending habits. He tells Willie, “What she wants, my man, is everything there is. Sable coats, suede chairs, a Cuisinart and a cook to run it, trips to wherever-it-is Hong Kong, five-hundred-dollar shoes, and fourteen-carat gold fingernails” (86).

Furthermore, when Shooter bought himself a recliner, she gave it away because it did not match the rest of her furniture. Willie tries to defend her: “She's doin' what she can. Makin' you look good, and makin' your house look good. You quit work, she'll make poor look good. So you shut up about you have to work to pay her bills” (93). Because Shooter and Sondra are the children of his best friends, Willie is absolutely determined to help make their marriage work: “And you are going to stay married to her or you are going to have to answer to me. … And you are going to keep her happy or you are gonna stay outta my sight. You gonna grow up if it kills you” (86). His devotion is indicative of his character; he is also old-fashioned in his disapproval of Shooter's mild flirtation with Deedee. Stubborn and fierce, he repeatedly tells Shooter to go home, and he makes pointed references to “your wife.”

Willie also encourages them to have children, but this is another sore spot because Shooter wants children and Sondra does not. He tells Willie she has said, “I'm gonna blow up like a whale? Not this body, baby. Uh-uh, honey” (94), and she uses every form of birth control available. Willie shifts the responsibility back to Shooter, saying that if he would stay at home more, she might be more receptive. With an offstage character like Sondra, the question might arise as to how fair or accurate her depiction is because she is not there to speak for herself. There is only what the other characters say about her, yet Shooter's sincerity is convincing enough to give credibility to his description of her shallowness.

A final indication of Sondra's character is her reaction to another offstage character—her father, George. George's health is failing, and Shooter has bought him a motorized wheelchair. When Willie tells him how George appreciates it, Shooter replies, “Sondra said he wouldn't even know it was real leather, but I figured, what the hell, it's only money” (83). Although Willie admits she does call her father, she has been reluctant to visit George, saying he has been “smelling funny” (102). Shooter treats Sondra's father better than she does. Willie has similarly let George fill the jukebox with his favorite oldies, although George likes “real crap” like Tennessee Ernie Ford and Pat Boone (102).

Shooter's realization of Willie's kindness and love helps to bring them close together at the end of the act. But before their final embrace, they must come to terms with the third offstage character, Shooter's father. Shooter, whose real name is Gary Wayne, has been using his father's name, but Willie pointedly calls him G. W. Shooter tries to imitate his father's moves and speech habits, but he does not have the pool skills of his father. Shooter confides to Deedee how close his father, Willie, and George were: “I ever needed anything, lunch money, rubbers, anything, didn't matter which one I asked. Seemed like it all came out of the same pocket” (97). Willie repeatedly reminds Shooter that he paid the costs of Shooter's birth and that he took care of the arrangements after Shooter's father committed suicide. The suicide is another troubling topic for Shooter. He wants to know why his father killed himself and why he leaped from the salvage-yard side of the bridge rather than into the water. Willie explains that his father jumped because he knew he was losing his legendary pool skills and chose the junkyard side because he was a good swimmer and did not want to be able to back out (88-89). At last they reach some understanding of a man they both loved. When Willie and Shooter have finally said everything they need to say, they begin playing pool, reciting in unison one of Shooter's father's favorite expressions: “Give me a break” (103).

Although not as dependent on offstage characters as is Third and Oak, Norman's next play, The Holdup, still concludes some use of this technique. In The Holdup, set in 1914, the last legendary outlaw has come to a watering hole in New Mexico to meet his former sweetheart, Lily. They find a cookshack set up for a wheat-threshing crew and currently being guarded by the Tucker brothers, Henry and Archie. Henry is a mean, bitter man obsessed with outlaw legends, whereas Archie is an innocent seventeen-year-old. The Outlaw shoots Henry and tries to commit suicide with morphine but is saved by Archie and Lily. By the end of the play, the Outlaw and Lily will marry, and Archie is ready to face whatever adventures life can offer him. Richard Wattenberg has shown how Norman has transformed the “frontier myth”:

The old frontier myth which revolves around a climactic “marriage” of male/West/savagery with female/East/civilization gives way to a more realistic vision of the frontier experience as a growth-process pointing toward some nebulous future climax or resolution.⁸

The key action is Archie's initiation to adulthood, and one of the significant offstage influences is his dominating mother. He reveals that he has not signed up to participate in the budding war effort, because “Mother would kill me” (110), and Henry later snidely remarks, “Archie would shoot a good horse if Mother told him to” (115). But by the end of the play, he makes love to Lily on his mother's quilt, and Lily promises to write his good-byes to his mother (155). This change signals his passage to adulthood (Wattenberg, 514).

One offstage character, a rancher who had proposed to Lily, is a catalyst in Lily's development. The Outlaw rode across the country to shoot him, revealing the depth of the Outlaw's feeling for Lily. Shot by the jealous Outlaw, the rancher left his money to Lily, who built a school with his money and in his name, thus associating herself with the education of the West (Wattenberg, 510).

Two additional offstage characters—the Outlaw's brother and nephew, Bill and Fred—were killed in an attempted robbery after the Outlaw fled the scene. Henry tells the Outlaw what had happened, having read about it in one of the outlaw magazines in the barbershop. Henry delights in rubbing in the gory details of their deaths:

The shot blew Bill right out of the saddle, but Fred's body kept riding around till somebody plugged the horse in the belly. Damn strong horse though. Made it all the way to the post office hitching post where it finally fell down in a big mess of blood, squashed Fred's body underneath, flat as flat. And where were you?

(129)

Henry's meanness prepares the audience to accept the Outlaw's killing of him. The Outlaw's guilt over the deaths of Bill and Fred also make his character more sympathetic.

It is in Norman's best known play, 'night, Mother, however, that offstage characters gain even more prominence. This tense drama features only two people onstage as Jessie Cates seeks to rationalize her impending suicide to her mother Thelma (“Mama”). Their discussions bring to life several additional characters who have influenced their lives and contributed to Jessie's decision: Jessie's father, her brother Dawson and his wife Loretta, her son Ricky, her ex-husband Cecil, and Mama's friend Agnes Fletcher.

At the beginning of the play, Jessie is searching for her father's pistol. She has one of Cecil's but wants to use her father's, indicating the closeness of the relationship. Jessie knew her father loved her. He had made pipe cleaner creatures for her, and they had carried on private conversations of which Mama was jealous. In contrast, Jessie's father did not have much to say to Mama, even on his deathbed: “It was his last chance not to talk to me and he took full advantage of it.”⁹ Mama is finally able to admit that she did not love him, and Jessie desires this kind of honesty on this last night of her life. She wants answers, for herself and Mama. Jessie learns that her father also had suffered epileptic fits, as she does, giving Mama someone to blame besides herself (although she does that, too).

As Jessie searches for her father's pistol, she comments that Dawson had better not have it (8). Her resentment of him is obvious in her complaints: “He just calls me Jess like he knows who he's talking to” (23), but he does not know her. He buys her slippers that fit his wife's feet, not hers. That they have never been close is underscored when Jessie reports that after she asked him what kind of bullets she should buy (not telling him for what purpose), “He said we ought to talk like this more often” (15). She enjoys the joke of his unwitting participation and later enjoys the power she will have because he will follow the instructions she is leaving on what to buy Mama for Christmas.

Jessie feels Dawson does know things about her that she does not wish him to know. She is adamant about keeping him out of her last evening. She instructs Mama to let the police into her room first after she is dead, not Dawson, and also tells her not even to share any of the funeral food with Dawson and Loretta. As Jenny S. Spencer points out, “Dawson's deliberate exclusion from this evening protects Jessie's already violated sense of privacy and thereby thwarts his only power over her” (Spencer, 368). At least Jessie gives him credit for being able to take care of their mother. She keeps telling Mama to call Dawson to take care of problems—if she has a mouse, if the lights go out, if the police call to tell her Ricky has done something serious.

Jessie's son Ricky is another source of pain for her. He is becoming a serious juvenile delinquent. Jessie is completely honest, however pessimistic, in assuming what Ricky is capable of doing:

Those two rings he took were the last valuable things I had, so now he's started in on other people, door to door. I hope they put him away sometime. I'd turn him in myself if I knew where he was.

(11)

She later says it is “only a matter of time” before he kills someone (25) or is doing time: “five years for forgery, ten years for armed assault” (60). But she identifies with him:

We look out at the world and we see the same thing: Not Fair. And the only difference between us is Ricky's out there trying to get even. And he knows not to trust anybody and he got it straight from me. And he knows not to try to get work, and guess where he got that.

(60)

Throughout the play, whenever Jessie comments on Ricky, Mama springs to his defense, always expressing the hopes that he will change, find a job, marry, be “nice” again. This action reinforces Mama's blind optimism, her desire not to see the truth. But by the end of the play, when Jessie tells her that she is leaving Ricky her watch, Mama admits he will sell it to buy dope—she is finally on the road to understanding.

In seeking to understand Jessie's decision, Mama wants to know whether it is anyone's fault. One person to blame might be Cecil, Jessie's ex-husband. Cecil, a carpenter who builds things to last, could not make his marriage last, despite Jessie's love and her efforts to please him. Jessie does not blame him, saying that his departure was “a relief in a way. I never was what he wanted to see, so it was better when he wasn't looking at me all the time” (61). Not only does this comment reflect Jessie's intense need for privacy, but it also echoes Mama's earlier comment that she did not have anything Jessie's father wanted (46). Sally Browder has written that “women's lives are embedded in relationships,” and sometimes women determine their value in terms of what they have to offer others.¹⁰ Both Mama and Jessie feel they have been inadequate in their relationships with the offstage characters as well as each other (see also Spencer, 375).

Cecil is also part of Mama and Jessie's honesty, an essential element of the evening. Mama admits she maneuvered the relationship, and Jessie admits she wrote Cecil's good-bye note. Both finally acknowledge that he left because he was having an affair, not because he made Jessie choose between him and cigarettes, or because her fits made him sick, or because he simply did not know how to hold on (56-57).

The woman with whom Cecil has an affair is the daughter of the last significant offstage character—Mama's friend Agnes. In a segment that provides some comic relief, Mama exaggerates Agnes's eccentricities in an effort to entertain Jessie. She says that Agnes has “burned down every house she ever lived in,” even setting out chairs and serving lemonade once; that Agnes has a house full of birds; that Agnes eats okra twice a day (38-40). But Jessie finally wrings the truth from Mama and emphasizes that the truth is what she wants. She also needs to know why Agnes will no longer visit their house and is amused to learn that Agnes is afraid of her.

Mama informs Jessie of one of Agnes's sayings: “You gotta keep your life filled up.” Mama adds, “She says a lot of stupid things” (40), yet this is how Mama lives—keeping her life filled with candy, TV, and crocheting, as Norman herself points out.¹¹ Mama also has friends like Agnes, and Jessie does not—a key difference between them. Jessie knows that Agnes will be there to comfort Mama after she is gone, helping with funeral details and perhaps even staying with her. Jessie had earlier suggested the possibility of Agnes's moving in, but Mama was quick to deny the friendship so Jessie could not use that thought to ease her conscience. Like the other offstage characters, Agnes serves multiple functions and is part of the complex patterns Norman skillfully weaves under the play's surface simplicity (Harriot, 142).

Norman's next play, Traveler in the Dark, also revolves around offstage characters. Brilliant surgeon Sam has returned home for the funeral of his devoted friend and nurse, Mavis, who died of cancer despite Sam's efforts to save her. Mavis's death forces Sam to come to terms with the other major crisis in his life—the death of his mother, Mary, when he was young. These two losses have caused a tremendous crisis of faith.

A minor offstage character is Sam's mother-in-law. She is rich and enjoys displaying her wealth. She is a snob (Glory, Sam's wife, has not brought “the right clothes” to suit her, [195]) and has a new “boy toy.” She serves mainly as a comic foil to Glory, who is warm and caring, but the bulk of the play belongs to Mary and Mavis.

Mary and Mavis are depicted almost as fully as the characters onstage. Sam remembers his mother's nurturing: she read him fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and would show him things “like dragons' teeth, witches' fingers and fallen stars.” He thinks of her in terms of sweets:

She was the gingerbread lady. Curly red hair and shiny round eyes and a big checked apron. Fat, pink fingers, 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.

(171)

Everett, Sam's preacher father, recalls his wife's humor. She would bake cookies for someone, eat them herself, and then send the wax paper she baked them on with a note to the recipient. Her homespun wisdom is seen in her comment that marriage

was like your favorite shirt. You could wear it day after day, and you could try to keep it clean, but sooner or later it was going to have to go in the wash. But as soon as it was clean, you could press it fresh, and put it back on, looking good as new.

(179)

Mavis also is made vivid by what the characters say and remember about her. In love with Sam, she was proud of his accomplishments and sent Everett clippings about Sam's successes. Despite her unrequited love, she could also be a good friend to Glory; she borrowed money from Everett so that Glory could have cosmetic surgery on her eyes. She had a cat named Peaches, to whom she made Everett talk on the phone. She was self-sacrificing at every opportunity, and Glory tells Sam that she died unafraid (198).

Mavis is a source of tension between Sam and Everett. Everett had wanted Sam to marry Mavis and resents the way Sam treated her, accusing Sam of taking everything Mavis had (179). Sam, in turn, resents his father for not paying attention to his mother: “You even loved Mavis more than Mother” (191). Mavis's death has caused Sam to confront not only his feelings about her and his mother but also those about Everett. Mavis's death also causes Sam to panic about his marriage, and he tells Glory he wants a divorce. By the end of the play, he realizes that this was only a knee-jerk response, made because he did not want to hurt Glory as he thinks he had hurt his mother and Mavis, or because he feared losing her, too (203).

His mother's death affected Sam as much as Mavis's did. Everett says Mary's death is the reason Sam became a doctor (183). It is also the reason he lost the faith that made him a child preacher, and he blames God as well as his father. He is angry at her, too, for leaving him. He expresses this by explaining to his son, Stephen, why Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall:

His … mother … laid him there. … She told him he was a man. See? She dressed him up in a little man's suit. He didn't know he could fall. He didn't know he could break. He didn't know he was an egg.

(164-65)

Mary's death taught Sam he could break. He later says he should have known Mavis would die, because his mother died (170). Mary's death started the process that Mavis's death completes. By the end of the play, he has worked through his guilt and pain until he understands that faith is like the geodes his mother collected but would never break open: “It was better for it to be safe than for you to know what it was, exactly” (201). Sam and Everett eventually reconcile their differences with each other, and Everett's speech about Mary at the end of the play could apply to Mavis as well:

I guess you can be a real big part of somebody else's world without ever understanding the first thing about it. Somebody can give you their life and you'll never know why. Never know what they wanted from you, or if they ever got it. Then when they die, well, knowing so little about these people makes it real hard to lose them.

(200-201)

This is the lesson Everett and Sam learn through the deaths of Mary and Mavis, and it is a key theme of Norman's—people learning to understand each other.

Everett and Sam join Arlie, Deedee and Alberta, Shooter and Willie, the Outlaw and Lily, and Jessie as complex characters who come to terms with themselves and whom Norman shapes by her use of offstage characters.

Notes

1. Mel Gussow, “Women Playwrights: New Voices in the Theater,” New York Times Magazine (1 May 1983), 26.

2. Marsha Norman, Four Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988). All quotations from these four plays are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Lisa J. McDonnell, “Diverse Similitude: Beth Henley and Marsha Norman,” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring 1987), 95-104.

4. Leslie Kane, “The Way Out, the Way In: Paths to Self in the Plays of Marsha Norman,” Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 257, 268-269.

5. Lori Miller, “Writing Was the Only Choice,” New York Times Book Review (24 May 1987), 10.

6. Esther Harriot, American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988), 134.

7. Jenny S. Spencer, “Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-Drama of Female Identity,” Modern Drama 30, no. 3 (1987), 365. See also C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 316.

8. Richard Wattenberg, “Feminizing the Frontier Myth: Marsha Norman's The Holdup,” Modern Drama 33, no. 4 (December 1990), 513.

9. Marsha Norman, 'night, Mother (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 53. All further citations from this play are parenthetical within the text.

10. Sally Browder, “‘I Thought You Were Mine’: Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother,” in Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, ed. Mickey Pearlman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 111.

11. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koening, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 328.