[Getting Out] is a post-prison drama: we watch Arlene … make her shattered way back into the real world while Arlie …, Arlene's former self, is present on stage in a series of linked flashbacks. Norman is intent on describing a world that is a permanent prison and a prisoner who is not rehabilitated but gutted.

This script is weighted down with intelligence. Arlie is presented as a thoroughly dangerous and unpleasant person whose response to a brutalizing childhood is brutality; the description is one that understands both the individual and social antecedents of personality. The chaplain who is credited by Arlene with changing her life is, it turns out, the man responsible for the gravest brutality done to her, while the auxiliary characters who slowly pull the story out on stage are all a step, but only a step, away from stock. If the flashback technique seems arch at times (mention of Johnny Cash in the apartment leads to flashback of guard singing Johnny Cash songs in jail) it is descriptive of the memory process Norman wants to portray. Getting Out is a pretty well-made play which manages to avoid both the sentimental and the sententious.

I also found [the production] … rather boring. There's no exhilaration in sheer verbal power, no joy about creating a work for the stage. W. H. Auden described being approached by two kinds of aspiring writers: those who wanted to write because they felt they had something to say, and those who loved to play with words. The former he sent packing. The latter, he thought, might stand a chance. I suspect Norman wrote Getting Out because she thought she had something to say. It's a tame work, a respectable play which takes few chances. Since writing Getting Out, Norman has produced two more scripts: I'd like to see them. They should tell us whether or not Marsha Norman has learned how to play in the theatre as well as how to write a play. (p. 129)