'night, Mother [is] honest, uncompromising, lucid, penetrating, well-written, dramatic, and as unmanipulatively moving as we expected from the author of the remarkable Getting Out. Though there are many laughs, I cannot tell you that the play isn't, as the popular parlance has it, "depressing." But I can tell you that it gleams with wisdom, reeks of observed and comprehended reality. That it is something to feel, think, and talk about; that it will force you to examine and re-examine new and old beliefs, fresh and stale convictions. That it will relentlessly confront you with your own and other people's humanity; that it will do what only the profoundest things—philosophy, religion, and art—can do for human beings, which may not be much but is all there is.

The play combines the lucent objectivity of a case history with the sublime subjectivity of language, style, art; it does not wrest forced, factitious tears from you, and it scrupulously, fastidiously refrains from telling you what to think. The subjects are suicide, love, and the meaning of life—as huge as they come; but they are treated with the specificity of threading a needle or choosing the right breakfast for your needs. Humor and pathos pop up as naturally as wild flowers or fences by the roadside; there is devastating psychological accuracy and nothing seems contrived; and there is that bustle of minutely perceived existential details that bespeak the master. The imminent suicide, from force of habit, puts lotion on her hands after doing the dishes; the mother, told by her daughter to keep washing a dirty chocolate pan after the shot rings out from behind the locked door for as long as it takes for the police and relatives to arrive, tries to assert her independence by saying she'll just sit and wait—yet as she goes to the phone after the gunshot, she already clutches the pan.

Believers and atheists, Freudians and anti-Freudians, rationalists and idealists, Marxists and capitalists, parents and children—everyone will have his or her interpretation of 'night, Mother. I think I know what Miss Norman really meant by it, but so will you, and your meaning, I wager, will be different. Good! Perhaps even great…. Miss Norman may not provide answers, but anyone who can serve up questions so brilliantly—in language that is only slightly, but finally appositely and awesomely, heightened—has more than earned that right. (pp. 56-7)