If the hoopla about Marsha Norman's new play ['night, Mother] were credible, the current state of American drama would be better than it is…. Because the play has only two characters, is in one long act, and ends with a death, some commentators have called it classical and have invoked Aristotle. I envy their rapture; the play itself keeps me from sharing it. 'night, Mother is certainly better written and constructed than Norman's last New York production, Getting Out, but like that earlier play, the new one is fundamentally a stunt. Moreover, I think it has been misconstrued by most who have written about it, and apparently by the author herself. (p. 47)

Inarguably 'night, Mother addresses deeper themes [than Getting Out], is less flashy, and has a number of sharp lines; nonetheless it too is a device, a stunt, and not an authentic drama; and it fails at being even the drama that it claims to be.

The play seems to be about a woman in her thirties for whom life has lost savor and point and who decides to make a quick exit with one bullet: it seems to be a drama of the courage to face nullity, to recognize and reject it. Jessie is a plump, divorced country woman who lives with her widowed mother in the family home…. At the moment that the play begins, Jessie comes into the parlor-and-kitchen set carrying a beach towel and asks her mother whether there's a sheet of plastic around. The question is matter-of-fact, as is her question about where Daddy's gun is. She climbs to the attic, gets the pistol, and announces as she cleans it that she is going to kill herself. At the end of an hour and a half, by the clock on the wall crammed with doodads, she goes into the bedroom, locks the door, and does it. (The play could have used the same title as the last Norman work.)

After Jessie's calm announcement of intent, her mother, Thelma, goes through recurring stages of disbelief, fright, panic, near-petulance, near-acceptance, and dismay. Jessie just plows ahead through the last ninety minutes of her life, occasionally pierced by stabs of feeling, but mostly making careful preparations or informing Thelma of preparations already made, including much trivia about deliveries of groceries, milk, and candy.

The trivia are used as light background for the dark matters that are revealed. Jessie has been divorced by the husband she still loves; her teenage son is a thief and drug addict living on the loose; she has epilepsy, as her father had. She has had a year's remission of the illness, which apparently is meant to underscore that she is not committing suicide to escape it. Nor is she killing herself because of any other circumstance of her life that we learn about. Why, then, is she doing it? She is empty. She has been waiting for herself all these years, and "'I' never got here." Her life is so unvaryingly flavorless that, she says, death will only be like getting off a bus fifty blocks before the end of the line. She is quitting life fifty years before the end because she will be in the same "place" then as she is now.

Despite her mother's increasing terror, Jessie is obdurate. "You are my child!" cries Thelma. "No," Jessie replies, "I am what became of your child." At the last, a self-determined last, she tears herself from her mother's grasp, goes into the bedroom, locks the door so that Thelma can't be suspected of murdering her, and after a moment, shoots.

Ostensibly we have been watching the last moments of a present-day spiritual aristocrat, a woman who can look on life and death with a judicious eye and can choose courageously, a woman who recognizes desolation and declines to be humiliated by it even if her choice costs her life. But is that really what we have seen?

How can we accept Jessie's statements about herself: accept her condition of emancipated despair? If these things were true, what possible reason would she have to announce her decision, then put her mother through those ninety minutes? She says she is doing it to spare Thelma the pain of discovery after the event. Is this a rational way to spare another person pain: to subject her mother to these ninety minutes and leave her with a memory of them in addition to the suicide? Could a nobly philosophic, privately resolved Jessie really come in calmly with that blanket, calmly ask for a plastic sheet and a pistol, and calmly sit there cleaning the pistol in front of her mother? In reality, we are watching an act of vengeance. Jessie is not, as implied, our vicar in a Slough of Despond that possibly threatens us all. Jessie is a case. She is a woman haunted by an illness that may recur, a woman parted from the husband she loves because, she says, he asked her to choose between him and smoking! As for her relationship with her mother, Thelma says she got tired of watching Jessie and her father, whom Jessie loved, "going on and off like electric lights" because of their illness. This is the same Thelma who walked away from her husband's deathbed to watch Gunsmoke because he wouldn't talk to her.

Add up all these elements, and Jessie stands clear as a vengeful neurotic, not a tragic heroine. It's a truism that suicides are committed at someone, and this play, intentionally or not, dramatizes it. Jessie's last utterance, which is the title of the work, is the last twist of the knife. Instead of a woman quietly exalted by her ultra-rational choice and by her will to carry it out, we see a woman deceptively serene (as serenity often is), whose life has been made impossible by ill luck and warped values, whose buried hatred for her mother has italicized her despair, who is bent on suicide, and who comes in to torture her mother for ninety minutes before doing it. That grim, twisted Jessie is latent in the script, of course, or she couldn't be perceived; but Norman, deliberately or unwittingly, has chosen to present Jessie as a rustic female samurai who speaks implicitly to the residual nobility in us all.

Thelma, too, is contradictorily drawn. From Moment One she is almost a caricature of a self-centered old baby, with no more brain than she needs to make hot chocolate and watch TV. And what does this silly old woman do when she hears her daughter's suicide plan? She plunges into deterrent chat, in domestic light-comedy style. Instead of the hysteria we might expect from this dodo, instead of the screaming or fainting or struggle or even a transparent ruse to get the gun, she casts herself as a partner in a "clever" cat-and-mouse duet, as if she were accustomed to such crises and were competent to handle them. When she sees deterrence failing, she thinks more of the threat to herself than to Jessie, of the disturbance of her cozy life, and in childish pique she makes a mess—she throws pots on the floor. Thelma's actions result not from the complexity of a character, but from the traffic-management of a character by its author to make the play possible.

That is the pervasive flaw of the whole play: manipulation. To put it another way, if the play were true—true to Norman's characters as she wants us to think of them—it wouldn't exist. Either Jessie would shoot herself before it begins, or, as soon as she discloses her plans, Thelma would collapse. Thus, though 'night, Mother is more subtle than Getting Out, it is at bottom equally a stunt, a contrivance, and the author's tyrannical governance of characters in order to flesh out a gimmicky framework: the suicide announcement at the start and the pistol shot at the finish.

Thelma's one impeccable line comes right after the shot. Against the locked bedroom door she sobs: "Forgive me. I thought you were mine." The drama that really leads to that line—of a clawing Electra complex, of the mother's mirror-image hatreds, and of the pity overarching both—has not been written. (pp. 47-8)