When I first saw Marsha Norman's technically accomplished and vigorously acted "Getting Out" …, I left the theater irritated with myself for having, in the end, become irritated by the play. Surely my discontent was unreasonable in the face of all that was admirable here. The author had elected to show us two facets of a girl's personality … by letting [two actresses] share the same stage space, with their paths crossing often enough, and intimately enough, for one to pause to light the other's cigarette. The younger, thrashing willfully about in baseball cap and sneakers, roamed the stage fitfully, now hugging the bedclothes of her childhood home in Kentucky, now tilting a chair and rocking in sassy rhythm as she gave a psychiatrist short shrift, now setting fire to the cell in which she'd landed after the fatal shooting of a gas station attendant.

The older, insisting that she was no longer the rebellious and immature Arlie but a reformed Arlene bent on a responsible new life, spent her first day on parole adrift in a grimy apartment, clutching at her own forlorn elbows, starting in fright at the first knock on the door. The psychological interplay between Arlie and Arlene was ingeniously sustained, the overlapping of past and present virtually musical in its counterpoint. (pp. 112-13)

Now that the play [has resurfaced] …, I think I begin to see why I balk. The evening's virtues remain virtues….

But here's the problem. Sympathetic as we are to a girl who's recovered from a ramshackled childhood and summoned up the shaky strength to go it alone, we're still not prepared to suffer (for her, with her) all of the blows aimed at her as she takes a first step toward freedom. The guard who has so generously driven her from the "correctional facility" back to her home state is, in fact, on the make—violently so. The mother who has come to give the premises a fast wipe with a mop is actually there to tell her, bluntly and coarsely, that she can neither visit her family for a Sunday dinner nor see her own small son. The curly-headed, twitchy-fingered junkie who was once her lover and pimp arrives on the double—he's just escaped from his own prison—to lure her, or lambaste her, into resuming a profitable way of life. The only window she can look out of has bars on it: they are there to forestall thieves, but they are bars again. The bag of groceries she has so hopefully shopped for winds up scattered all over the still-filthy floor. Arlene cannot even get a lithograph of Jesus, the gift of a chaplain who has helped her, to hang straight on the wall.

I don't mean to be facetious about the girl's troubles, or to suggest that the play ever loses its earnestness. But too much is askew. The barrage of ills that assails the curiously passive Arlene is so unremitting (with the last-minute exception of a kindly, if thoroughly realistic, girl from upstairs) that we come to see some of them as gratuitous, some of them as repetitive. The pimp, for instance, appears in each of the play's two acts, slipping through the doorway on jittery feet to sneer, cajole, and, if necessary, attempt rape. But both scenes are the same scene, pursuing the same pattern of persuasion and threat. In time, we come to expect that all encounters will go badly; the badgering downhill structure becomes predictable, and leaves us restive.

Playwright Norman undoubtedly wants us to know just how rugged the straight and narrow can be; by her own rights, she's surely being honest. But honesty needn't rule out a degree of surprise, a pinch of variety, along the way. Shouldn't Arlene—with her so knowing background—anticipate the turn of events much more quickly than she does, and perhaps cope more inventively now and again? (p. 113)