Contemporary American Playwrights - Marsha Norman

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Marsha Norman
Emily Mann speaks of the tendency of women to sit around and talk to
each other about their memories of devastating events in their lives.
Sometimes, she suggests, it is family members, touching on exposed
wounds, sometimes it is ‘perfect strangers . . . [who] sit and talk like other
people talking about the weather or sports, except that it’s about their
divorce . . . We often see the pain in one another and then we talk about
it.’
1
Though Louisville-born Marsha Norman hesitates to see herself as
specifically a woman playwright it would, on the face of it, be hard to
find a better description of aspects of her plays from Getting Out through
to ’night Mother. For not only does she find in dialogue between women a
way of opening up channels to emotional needs and anxieties but she is
aware of the degree to which theatre itself depends on dialogue, a dia-
logue not restricted to the stage.
Describing the nature of the playwright’s relationship to the commu-
nity, she observes that ‘you can really see it when writers’ work is part of
a continuing dialogue’, regretting only that ‘the audience is no longer in
touch with that dialogue’ because ‘you can’t write out of a tradition that
the audience knows – unless you write TV plays’.
2
However, as Third and
Oak: The Pool Hall makes plain, men, too, are part of this community and
as such are no less vulnerable, no less capable of revealing themselves
and their fears, than are women. For somewhere beneath the apparent
banalities of conversations which seem no more than ways of passing
the time, of filling the silence, are emotional truths which bruise the lan-
guage and expose hidden tensions and anxieties.
Though for the most part she has chosen to focus on women Norman

does not buy into the notion that they are uniquely sensitive, distinctively
vulnerable. They may, as this play makes apparent, find different eti-
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1
Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York,
), p. .
2
David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. .
quettes, different ways of concealing painful truths or offering hesitant
gestures of support, but they confront the same absurdities, inhabit the
same bewildering social and psychological worlds, express the same
sense of loss, look for the same possibility of connection. They, too, are
actors offered roles they find difficult to invest with true conviction while
aware that such meaning as they can generate may only come from those
who respond to their lines, who exist within the same stories.
Marsha Norman grew up in Louisville, the daughter of a Methodist fun-
damentalist who excluded radio and television from the family home
and kept her daughter apart from other children. As a result, and not
untypically, she created an imaginary friend, pluralising herself for
comfort, engaging in conversations with herself. She became a talented
musician and considered studying composition at the Juilliard, later
claiming that her sense of rhythm was musically rather than linguisti-
cally based. Curiously, the fundamentalism did not extend to books or
the theatre. Thus she recalls, in particular, seeing a production of The
Glass Menagerie and, later, the ‘really violent early work of Peter Shaffer,
things like Royal Hunt of the Sun, and also J.B., Macbird, pieces that have a
wild-haired theatricality’. These, she insists,
were the ones that really moved me. Particularly those about people in search
of unseeable parts of themselves. I realize now that it’s no accident that Getting
Out is about an attempted reconciliation between an earlier, violent self and a

current passive, withdrawn self. It seemed to me that the theatre was the place
to examine that isolation which was the primary quality of my life. It was mine
not only by birth and early childhood, but it’s something that I have sought to
maintain, not in an arrogant way, but because it seems to me that I belong off
by myself. (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.)
Marsha Norman majored in philosophy at Agnes Scott College in
Atlanta, where she attended the Pocket Theatre and Theatre Atlanta.
Despite her enthusiasm, however, she never considered the theatre as a
career and after graduation went back to Louisville to marry and under-
take a master’s degree. She then worked first in a mental hospital and
then for the state arts commission, two probably not entirely unrelated
activities. She later became involved in children’s television in Louisville,
a city in which there was also a significant theatre, finally turning to
drama at the behest of Jon Jory of the Actors Theatre of Louisville,
famous for its annual new plays festival.
Norman might well have begun her career, like Emily Mann, as a
writer of documentary drama. Certainly Jory offered to commission her
Marsha Norman 
to develop a play from a series of interviews about busing, then a
significant political and social issue. But though she was later to make
use of interview material, along with her ear for natural dialogue, she
rejected his proposal and, at his suggestion, developed another project.
As she explained, he urged her to ‘find some moment when I had been
frightened physically, in real danger’ (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.).
The suggestion brought to mind a young girl she had known ten years
earlier at the Central State Hospital, a girl who had lacked all control,
all fear and all inhibitions. She had gone on to serve time for murder. For
Norman, though, the attraction lay not so much in her violence as in the
dilemma of an individual finally unable to walk away from the conse-
quences of her actions. Released from prison, would she be released

from the sensibility that placed her there? How would she function when
the literal coercions of institutional life gave way to the more subtle coer-
cions of her own divided self ?
Her contact with the girl had been brief and apparently devoid of
genuine communication: ‘I only had an hour’s worth of conversation
with her in the entire time I knew her. And that was mainly saying “Don’t
destroy the furniture” toher, and her saying “Fuck you!” tome . . . That
was the entire content of our relationship’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews,
p. ). The question was how such a person could find her way out of
the trap in which she found herself, a trap in part a product of social
circumstance and in part the result of her own seemingly innate aggres-
sion. Beyond that was the question of how such a sensibility was to be
presented dramatically. Explaining the genesis of the form of the play,
and its roots in her conception of character and action, she insisted that:
What you need is a form that will contain the story. With Getting Out ...I knew
I wanted to write about this woman who’d just gotten out of prison, but I real-
ized that it’s not enough to write about her, you have to know who she was. Well,
as soon as you say that sentence, you have the form: put the other person on
stage. So you have this amazingly stable little triangle with the two of them and
the point of reconciliation. (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.)
In other words, the alternative possibilities confronting the protagonist
are to be dramatised by dividing that protagonist in two. That device,
not in itself novel (O’Neill attempted something similar with the use of
masks in The Great God Brown), is the source of Getting Out’s very consid-
erable power.
She was, however, faced with a problem in that when she undertook
research she discovered that those kept in long-term solitary
confinement tend to come out cold, passive and withdrawn. As she has
 Contemporary American playwrights
said, ‘I realized I had a problem. I wanted to write a hostile girl who

didn’t care what you did to her. But how could I write a hostile girl, if the
girl who came out of prison was perfectly tame? The solution to this
problem was the beginning of my life in the theatre. I would have to put
them both on stage – Arlie, the girl she had been, and Arlene, the woman
she had become in captivity – and the play would uncover the relation-
ship between them.’ It would also, however, reveal something else for, as
she observed, ‘I wasn’t writing about Arlie, I was writing about myself. I
would realize that all of us are frequently mistaken for someone we used
to be.’
3
The play is set in a one-room apartment in a run-down section of
Louisville. Next to it, connected by a catwalk and stairways, is a prison
cell. The curtains of the apartment conceal the bars on a single window
which imply that this, too, is a cell and the woman who lives in it no less
imprisoned than the younger version of herself who is seen in the prison
and at other moments of her life. A note tells us that Arlie, as opposed
to Arlene (a thin, drawn woman who has just emerged from an eight-
year prison sentence for murder), is the ‘violent kid’ Arlene had been
before her last stretch in prison. She is Arlene’s memory of herself, sum-
moned into existence, as Norman explains, ‘by fears, needs and even
simple word cues’.
4
The role of these memories, these former selves,
varies. Their chief characteristic, however, is persistence. They cannot
be escaped. They are one more evidence of her entrapment, within her
own past and her own sensibility, no less than within the constraints that
class and poverty place around her.
For five minutes before the curtain rises a loudspeaker broadcasts a
series of announcements of an institutional kind, their exact provenance
being unclear. When the curtain rises there is a black-out on stage as we

hear the warden’s voice itemise Arlene’s offences and announce her
rehabilitation and release. When the light rises, however, it is not on this
supposedly reformed character but on her earlier self, Arlie, who tells a
story which reveals her violence and cruelty as a child. The play then
proceeds to construct a portrait of Arlie/Arlene which serves to explain
both her violence and her chilling detachment from her actions.
The scene then cuts to Arlene’s entrance into the seedy apartment
which is either her destination or the limbo through which she will pass
on her way to further degradation. She is accompanied by a former
prison guard, Bennie, who has romantic and sexual designs on her. Her
Marsha Norman 
3
Marsha Norman, Marsha Norman: Collected Plays (Lyme, NH, ), p. .
4
Marsha Norman, Getting Out (New York, ), p. .
future is in the balance. The logic of her life, as it is slowly revealed, sug-
gests further decline, but she fights to identify another possibility. She
clearly has to reject Bennie, who represents continued exploitation and
imprisonment, but the dramatic conflict in Getting Out is not that between
Arlene and those who seek to control and shape her destiny, but that
within her own sensibility. From the beginning the two selves coexist,
past and present being intertwined as Norman interweaves timescales
and events, exploring and exposing the forces that created the violent
and self-destructive Arlie, and helped to shape the older Arlene, bewil-
dered, uncertain, but desperate to take control of her own life.
Arlie, we slowly learn, had been sexually abused by her violent father,
a man who had also physically abused her mother. That mother, in
response, had turned to other men. Her maternal instincts survive only
in the form of sporadic gestures. She now arrives at the apartment to
welcome Arlene but her attempts to brighten that apartment have the

air of pathos. She is acting out a role she no longer understands. Indeed,
when Arlene suggests that she might visit her she is rebuffed by a woman
who, ironically, explains that she cannot afford to have negative
influences in the family home. Empty of real affection, her mother has
in fact presided over a family of children each of whom has turned to
criminality (‘Pat, stealin . . . Candy screwin since day one, Pete cuttin up
ol Mac at the grocery, June sellin dope like it was Girl Scout cookies’)
(Getting Out,p.).
Arlie, like her younger sister, had turned to prostitution, love, in her
experience, being no more than a word for brief encounters with a cash
value. She is the mother of a child by her pimp, Carl, and has that child
taken from her. The child is the light towards which she stumbles, the
redemption which she convinces herself may give her life the meaning
it lacks. It seems no more than an illusion but it is what has brought her
to this moment in which she contemplates her life and struggles to decide
on her future.
The brilliance of the play, and this is one of the most impressive
debuts by an American playwright, lies in its structure as Arlene’s two
selves are brought together, exposing the nature of her experience,
implicitly debating its meaning and presenting the struggle of a woman
to transcend and transform her own identity. As Arlene says, ‘Arlie girl
landed herself in prison. Arlene is out’ (Getting Out,p.), a distinction
which is without meaning when she utters it at the beginning of the play
but which acquires meaning as it proceeds.
Arlie (the former self) lives defensively. Inducted into a life of corrupt
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love and brutality, she responds in kind, damaging herself in the process.
Her own hardness is a shell to protect herself from further injury but it
also betrays her. The physical entrapment of the Pine Ridge
Correctional Institute is merely an outward image of the more profound

imprisonment of Arlene within Arlie, as genuine needs and natural
affections are smothered by a paranoia which is not without its rational
basis and which is therefore scarcely paranoia at all. There comes a
moment, indeed, when she punctures herself repeatedly with a fork as
if she were trying to release the person within. The blood in which she
bathes is evidence of the redemption she seeks, a redemption to which
she is ostensibly led by a prison chaplain who tells her of the blood of
Christ. He gives her a picture which she carries with her on her eventual
release. But the chaplain, too, deserts her, being transferred to another
prison without telling her. Despite the picture, then, redemption, finally,
can only come from herself. Not merely must she escape Arlie; she must
also reconcile herself to her.
The two selves occupy the same space, walk the same stage, but show
no awareness of one another until the final scene. Their continued coex-
istence, indeed, is evidence that, whatever her hopes for a transformed
future, Arlene has yet to lay the ghosts of the past, that, indeed, there is
no chance of her doing so until she has confronted them. The play is
thus an extended act of confession, an attempt at expiation. It is a
psychotherapeutic session in which the individual is regressed in search
of an initiating trauma, and such a trauma is waiting there, though she
has spent her life to date denying it.
The interaction between the two selves is crucial and is used in a
number of different ways by Norman, as the prison experience also
mirrors events in her earlier life. Thus, memories of prison violence
blend into memories of her father’s violence. Past and present are
brought together, prompted by word cues, by associative fears, subtle
echoes and reverberations. So, her mother’s remark that she should have
been beaten, as her father had suggested, provokes thoughts of her abuse
at her father’s hands, which in turn summons Arlie into existence,
repeating denials of sexual molestation at her father’s hands, a central

truth which she desperately represses. When her mother remarks of a
closet that it is ‘Filthy dirty’ (p. ), this phrase in itself is sufficient to
trigger further recall of youthful anguish, Arlie curling into a ball as if
both to protect herself from assault and to contain the secret which is
slowly fracturing her psyche. What Arlene still cannot tell her mother in
the present spills out in her mind and is externalised in the form of
Marsha Norman 
Arlie’s desperate denials in the past. At the same moment, memories of
prison guards seeking sexual favours by offing chewing gum recall her
father’s habit of doing the same.
Arlene may insist to her mother that ‘They don’t call me Arlie no
more. It’s Arlene now’ (p. ), as if she had escaped her former self, but
at the same instant Arlie is seen rummaging through her mother’s purse.
That moment comes from a past (a past which breaks through into the
present, an objectified memory) in which she had been caught by the
school principal with the money in her hand, but this early in the play it
is by no means certain that this side of Arlene’s character has been laid
to rest, that she is herself not tempted to repeat the past.
Though she appears anxious to return to her mother, Arlene plainly
needs to leave behind all those who represent her past and, indeed, the
play consists of her slow shedding of those who had tried to shape and
control her, along with the self they had shaped. As Norman herself has
said, in a sense reversing the process of the play, ‘There comes a moment
...when we have to release our parents from our expectations’.
5
In fact
Arlene had few expectations and those that she had have long since
failed to be realised. Thus while she looked to her mother for protection,
for a role model, for comfort, instead that mother had condoned her
abuse, taken her along when she conducted empty affairs and is happy

now to expel her from the family home. Though Norman has said that
‘one of the problems for daughters and sons is that you come into life
with an unpayable debt, the mortgage of all time’ (Brater, ed., Feminine
Focus,p.) Arlene has to discharge a debt that in fact she can hardly
be said to owe. Yet she has come close to replicating the mother to whom
she still feels if not a sense of obligation then a sense of vague attach-
ment. And how could she not since she wishes to claim her own rights
as a mother, despite being responsible for the breach with her child,
despite being, in her turn, a dangerous and destructive model?
The fact remains that if she is to re-invent herself, become the protag-
onist of another drama of her own construction, she has to free herself
of her author, the mother who seems effectively to have written her life
for her, determining, by her disregard, her denial, her self-absorption,
the direction she was to take. Her mother accuses her of ‘playin’, acting
out sexual roles in the prison, of ‘actin’ worse with every passing day,
when in fact she has been desperately trying to discover her true self.
Arlene is unable to talk to her mother about the things which most
 Contemporary American playwrights
5
Enoch Brater, ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (Oxford, ), p. .
concern her, not least because that mother chooses to deny the reality of
the pain her daughter suffers. Norman herself recalls that her own
mother ‘had a very serious code about what you could and could not say.
You particularly could not say anything that was in the least angry or
that had any conflict in it at all’ (Brater, ed., Feminine Focus,pp.–). In
a sense, then, her plays, in addressing those very topics – anger and
conflict – themselves represent a release from that silence and denial
which she had herself experienced. Arlene, likewise, has to articulate her
own inner conflict until she can finally, in the last scene, acknowledge the
existence of Arlie and, implicitly, enter into a dialogue with her.

The various aspects of Arlene’s life are knitted together by a series of
linguistic echoes or by having Arlie occupy the same space as Arlene.
Thus her school principal promises her peanut butter and chili if she will
behave, as her father had brought chili and jelly doughnuts home to
placate her pregnant mother. Her mother, filling a bucket of water, says,
‘I’m waitin’ (Getting Out,p.) (for the water) while Arlie, immediately,
though in another timescale, says ‘I’m waitin’ (p. ) (for her lover, Carl).
Arlene lights a cigarette; Arlie steals the pack. Her mother complains
that Arlene is skinny and her hair a mess only for Arlie to defend her
mother against precisely the same attack (while a moment later
denouncing her ‘ugly hair’).
The mention of hair in turn triggers another memory for Arlene, a
memory which throws light on another aspect of her character. For in
recalling that her mother used to cut hair she admits that she had herself
taken beauty classes in prison, quite as if that mother had in some sense
remained a model, or perhaps as if she wished to be in a position to
rectify this flaw in her mother’s, and her, appearance. However, this is a
skill that can lead nowhere since ex-prisoners cannot be licensed as beau-
ticians. There is, in other words, no utility in this model, no way of
wiping away this memory of humiliation, any more than could her sister
who, we learn, had stolen wigs, prompted, presumably, by the same
sense of shame and embarrassment, by the same desire to cover up an
embarassing truth.
And so it continues throughout the play, with Norman weaving a
complex pattern linking past and present, mother and daughter and the
two parts of Arlene’s sensibility. A scene between Arlie and a doctor, in
which she admits to beating another girl because she suggested the exis-
tence of an incestuous relationship between Arlie and her father, is
played out as her mother sweeps the floor, remarking that, if left to
herself, she is likely to sweep the dust under the bed, this being precisely

Marsha Norman 
what she has done with her memories. In memory, the doctor tells Arlie
to take off her hat at the same moment that her mother discovers
Bennie’s hat on the bed in Arlene’s apartment, and in anticipation of
Carl, her pimp, recalling a hat chosen for him by Arlie.
To watch the play is to see a tapestry being sewn, a collage con-
structed. Like Emily Mann, Marsha Norman constructs the play like a
quilt. Indeed the second act begins with a loudspeaker announcement
which calls on the inmates to cooperate in creating a quilt ‘from scraps
of material’ and from ‘cutting up’ clothes, an announcement which is
itself a part of the intricate pattern of the play.
The play is full of authority figures: the school principal, a doctor, a
warden, prison guards, a clergyman, a pimp, all in one way or another
controlling Arlie’s life. These are not, however, all men, and interpreta-
tions of the play which see it as an assault on patriarchy seem wayward.
The fact is that Arlie/Arlene is a victim of more than male sexual
aggression, though her father’s sexual abuse is clearly what sends her
spinning into moral confusion as she suffers the consequences of her
own and others’ denial of its reality, while her vulnerability attracts men
who are anxious to take advantage of such a damaged sensibility. But
beyond this she is presented as someone whose principal struggle is to
resist the pathological role in which she is cast, who needs to see herself
as something more than a victim, more than the deterministic product
of environment and heredity.
Nor are the authority figures all conspiring to destroy her. The school
principal at first resists the idea that she should be consigned to a special
unit; the doctor makes some effort to understand her, the warden is not
without sympathy; the chaplain offers her such hope as she has. Even
Bennie, the former guard, is motivated by confused feelings of sexual
aggression and romantic need. He plays Mitch to Arlene’s Blanche

DuBois. He is a blundering man whose own loneliness makes him vul-
nerable, acting out a romantic role he is ill-suited to perform. Carl, to be
sure, does exploit her but she colludes, happily bearing his child, believ-
ing that this will give her what she lacks: consolation, love, control over
another person. He and she are drawn together by a shared weakness
concealed beneath a hard exterior.
The fact is, though, that she must leave such people behind. They rep-
resent a former life. She has to close the door on them all and find a solu-
tion to her life on her own, though Ruby, who lives in the same building
and shares a criminal past, points her in one possible direction. The
choice which confronts her is a stark one, that between the promise of
 Contemporary American playwrights
relative luxury as a prostitute and the certainty of relative poverty as a
dish washer in a nearby restaurant. Neither action would seem to repre-
sent escape. As she says to Ruby, ‘Outside? Honey I’ll either be inside this
apartment or inside some kitchen sweatin over the sink. Outside’s where
you get to do what you want, not where you gotta do some shit job jus
so’s you can eat worse than you did in prison’ (Getting Out,p.). The fact
is, though, that she has already escaped, already made her decision in
transforming Arlie into Arlene. She got out long before leaving prison.
She had already begun the process of laying Arlie to rest, a process,
however, which is not without pain, so that we are told that she is ‘Grieving
for this lost self’(p.). The play ends with the beginnings of a relation-
ship between Arlene and Ruby and with Arlene remembering, no longer
with pure regret, the life she has lived and the self to which she must
finally bid farewell.
Arlene’s struggle for autonomy offers something more than the
account of victory over determinisms, a woman’s fight for a right to her
own life. This is not simply a study of the pathology of child abuse or
the struggles of the underclass nor, though it is the chaplain who sets her

on her course to recovery, does conversion have anything to do with
religion. In the end it is Arlene herself who discovers in herself the
strength to break the logic of her own decline. Forging a new language,
as she adopts a new name, she allows that language to shape her con-
sciousness. Her final act of violence is directed against herself as she
bears the stigmata which are the mark of her own redemption.
The voices which begin both acts, and which echo in the darkness,
prescribe the limits of a world which she will finally not accept. And
though the room to which she retreats seems at first no more than an
extension of the cell which has defined the limits of her freedom, her
struggle to go out through the door represents her first entry into a world
of possibility as, in Norman’s later play ’night Mother, it represents a wilful
surrender of life which we must read as an embracing of life. In Ibsen’s
The Doll’s House the slamming of the door of the family home marked
the moment of a woman’s autonomy. For Virginia Woolf a room of
one’s own signified the necessary condition for freedom. So here, this
dingy one-room apartment must be made to represent a way-station on
a journey to self-realisation as Arlene puts behind her memories of
another house, of containing cells, constraining solitary confinements
and of her mother’s closet in which she had once been trapped. Only
now, perhaps, can she truly be said to be getting out, and though at the
play’s end both Arlie and Arlene are seen standing ‘as Mama did, one
Marsha Norman 
hand on her hip’ (Getting Out,p.), the last line – ‘Aw shoot’ – represents
the language of the reconstructed Arlene, not the foul-mouthed Arlie, as
the stage direction indicates that the lights dim on her ‘fond smile’, and
as she accepts the woman whose action she mirrors but whose sensibil-
ity she has at last transcended.
Norman has spoken of what seems to her to be a Southern element
in her work.

We share the notion that you cannot escape your family. You can’t escape where
you were born, who you were born to and what you’ve inherited. This is a south-
ern version of fate . . . Your family is going to hunt you down . . . Whatever you
have done since you left does not matter to them. Our writing is absolutely
linked to this problem of how do you change when the perceptions of the
people around you don’t change. How do you know who you are when you are
made up of these people that you despise? How do you move at all with all these
people hanging onto you? (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.)
This is essentially Arlene’s problem. She has changed but those around
her choose to see her in the same way. She cannot escape her mother,
only understand her for what she is and what she wishes to make of her
daughter. And beyond this, perhaps, Getting Out is, indeed, not without
its significance in terms of the region in which it is set. For Tennessee
Williams the South was a place where the past retained a destructive
hold on the present, freezing everything in place. It was built on denial,
on a refusal to acknowledge its own history of violence. For William
Faulkner a reflexive sexuality, contained within the family, became an
image of a society that had no desire to open itself to a new life, a symbol
of moral anarchy and social stasis. So it is here. It is not Arlene alone
who is trapped, contained and defined by the past, held in an hermetic
space, assaulted by those who should have protected and released her.
Beyond her is a family which seems dedicated to replicating its own
moral failings, repeating history, and beyond that a society which
appears to do likewise. She seems on the verge of getting out; the rest of
those we encounter remain what they were, with the exception of Ruby,
whose own decision makes Arlene’s more possible.
At the same time Norman has expressed concern that too close an
identification with its Southern setting might run the risk of limiting its
applicability: ‘If I were writing Getting Out today, you would probably not
be able to tell where it was taking place. As it is, it’s very specific. What

I want to present is the theatrical equivalent of Once upon a time ...which
lifts you off the stage and sends you back into yourself for reference
points’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews,p.). Her fear is that the asso-
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ciations conjured up by the South might distort and limit both its appeal
and its relevance. It is a strange and unnecessary fear.
Getting Out is a powerful, disturbing and moving work whose
significance transcends its setting and whose form reflects its content. It
won the George Oppenheimer Award and the Outer Circle Critics
Award for best new playwright.
Marsha Norman’s next piece, Third and Oak: The Laundromat (), first
produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville in  and then by the
Ensemble StudioTheatre in New York in the following year, is a subtle
character study in which a central theme of women’s theatre is explored:
loss. Two women meet in a laundromat. One, Alberta, is carefully
dressed and punctilious in her behaviour. Her laundry basket is neat. She
checks the cleanliness of the washing machines. The other, Deedee, is,
Norman indicates, ‘a wreck’, with her clothes bundled up in a man’s
shirt. At first their conversation is hesitant, at least on Alberta’s part. She
seems toprefer her privacy. But, unused tolaundromats, she finds herself
being offered advice and is drawn intoan apparently aimless dialogue.
By degrees, however, that dialogue begins to expose hidden truths and
suppressed fears. The twowomen begin tobuild up a picture of their
absent husbands, Deedee’s apparently working a double shift at a truck
factory, Alberta’s supposedly out of town on business, though she is less
willing tooffer details of her private life, deflecting questions as long as
possible. They share the same last name and, though from different social
worlds, it slowly emerges that they share something else as well. Both hus-
bands have deserted them, one by death, the other by philandering.
Deedee offers information about herself and slowly teases informa-

tion out of Alberta, some of it, as we eventually learn, a desperate inven-
tion. We learn that Alberta had been a teacher, abandoning her career
partly because, it seems, she was intimidated by her pupils, and partly to
nurse her sick mother. We learn that she had wanted but not had chil-
dren. Moment by moment her reserve is stripped away and the under-
lying pain of her life exposed. Deedee, meanwhile, two years married,
rhapsodises about her husband, a high school sweetheart, but confesses
that she, too, lacks the children she desires. He pours their money into
drag racing, leaving her with no more than fantasies of the life she had
once dreamed of. Alberta is quietly clever, Deedee confessedly ignorant.
Whenever Deedee’s probing gets close to the truth she would avoid,
Alberta deflects her with a question as Deedee simulates a cheerfulness
which becomes progressively thinner.
Marsha Norman 
By degrees the disappointments and disillusionments of their lives
force their way to the surface, never quite directly addressed, evident
only in the interstices of their exchanges. It is increasingly clear that
neither really read their husbands correctly, neither really had the inti-
macy for which they yearned and which they claim. They have filled the
spaces in their lives with stories, consoled themselves with fantasies, con-
structing myths which they separately inhabit.
Deedee, indeed, confesses to being drawn to a black disc jockey whose
radio show she hears in the small hours of the morning, a fact which
itself underlines her solitariness. It is that show which opens Third and
Oak: The Laundromat as the DJ signs off, ironically, by playing ‘Stand By
Your Man’. This character also forms the bridge into the play’s compan-
ion piece, Third and Oak: The Pool Hall, played together with the first play
in the Actors Theatre production. Indeed, when the two are played in
tandem Norman provides an extra scene not in the published version of
the first work. For the moment, though, the play ends as the two women

hesitantly confess what they have tried so hard to conceal, that the men
they are standing by are no longer there. Even now, though, they try to
shore up their crumbling stories, Deedee, in particular, seeking to retain
some vestige of pride: ‘You think he just didn’t come home, is that it?
You think I was over there waitin’ and waitin’ in my new nightgown and
when the late show went off I turned on the radio and ate a whole pint
of chocolate ice cream, and when the radio went off I couldn’t stand it
any more so I grabbed up all these clothes, dirty or not and got outta
there so he wouldn’t come in and find me cryin’...Well, (Firmly) I wasn’t
cryin.’’
6
The last phrase provides a dying fall.
Alberta, meanwhile, can only approach the fact of her husband’s
death obliquely, by recalling the death of her aunt’s pet rabbit, an occa-
sion when she ‘cried for a week’. Yet, she tells us, ‘I haven’t cried in forty
years’ (The Laundromat,p.). So, her husband’s death prompted no tears.
At the same time she cannot bring herself to let the air out of a beach
ball because it still contains his breath. Her grief is delayed. As befits her
character, it is contained. The conversation is the equivalent of letting
the air out of the redundant, but treasured, beach ball. The quality of
their loneliness differs. For Deedee it is crushing. She buys herself a
mirror so that the reflection will give her a companion. For Alberta, it is
a necessary privacy. She pulls her solitariness around her as if she could
thereby preserve something that would be lost if exposed to the world.
 Contemporary American playwrights
6
Marsha Norman, Third and Oak: The Laundromat (New York, ), pp. –.
Both women, however, slowly discover a mutuality which cuts across
class and radically different experiences. On the neutral territory of the
laundromat they are able to speak to one another and to themselves,

facing truths they have struggled to keep out of mind. The clothes they
carry, meanwhile, symbolise all too well the absent men, one a disor-
dered heap, the other a neat bundle with a single garment bearing the
stain of death. These are two women, waiting out their lives, dreaming
that someone will re-enter those lives and suffuse them with meaning.
This is a downtown Waiting for Godot.
It is not that women invariably offer one another such support and
consolation. Deedee’s relation with her mother, it transpires, is disas-
trous, though she is as lonely as her daughter (‘she don’t say two words
while I’m there’) (The Laundromat,p.). But Deedee and Alberta,
meeting in the dead time of night, itself a no man’s land, do find some
consolation. Earlier in the play they try to remember the names of the
dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, significantly forgetting one.
Later they recall: Happy. Both have significantly changed. A light comes
on in Deedee’s apartment, signifying the return of her wayward
husband but instead of rushing back she stays: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m
ready for a little peace and quiet’.
7
Alberta, meanwhile, feels that she
may soon be able to give her dead husband’s clothes away, to close the
book on the past and move on. Neither has solved her problems, which
cut too deep for glib conclusions, but each has changed through being
able to share her fears. The play’s dialogue gradually simplifies, as it does
in the concluding scene of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?,
and for much the same reason. As in that play, the illusions have faded
and there is a redemption, of sorts, in confronting the truth.
: Mrs. Johnson? (Hesitantly)
: Alberta.
: Alberta.
: Yes?

: I’m really lonely.
: I know.
: How can you stand it?
: I can’t. (Pauses.) But I have to, just the same.
: How do I ...how do you do that?
: I don’t know. You call me if you think of something. (Gives her a
small kiss on the forehead.)
: I don’t have your number. (Asking for it.) (The Laundromat,p.)
Marsha Norman 
7
Marsha Norman, Third and Oak: The Laundromat (New York, ), p. .
She does not give it to her. A further stage direction tells us that
Deedee is ‘Trying to reach across the space to her’(p.), but the gesture is
never completed. Deedee is left, instead, holding a bottle of Dr Pepper.
The nature of the balance between despair and consolation, solitariness
and a sense of shared pain, has changed, but the balance is still there.
Third and Oak: Laundromat has all the subtlety of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles.
As with that play, the audience is asked to reconstruct past events from
small clues, incremental changes, and though the women are in the fore-
ground Marsha Norman slowly builds a portrait of the absent men.
What is not there is as important as what is, and it could scarcely be oth-
erwise in a play in which absence is the central fact. Inconsequential
chatter becomes the mechanism for exposing the hidden, lies become
the means for revealing truths. It is the very evasions deployed by these
two lonely and desperate women which lay the trail towards the very
centre of their concerns. And if it be objected that the portrait of
women which emerges from the play is essentially negative, in that both
suppose that their lives derive their purpose from the men who have left
them, what emerges with equal force is their ability to offer understand-
ing and compassion to one another, to prepare to emerge from the iso-

lation to which they had imagined themselves condemned.
The bridging scene which Marsha Norman wrote to enable the two
plays to be performed in tandem is only five pages long but has a strange
impact on the first play into which it is inserted. In this new version the
two women are interrupted by the arrival of Shooter, the radio DJ, who
carries a duffle-bag of clothes into the laundromat. Not merely is the
crucial intimacy between the two women disturbed, the rhythm of their
developing relationship disrupted, but their characters, together with
their relationship, are changed. Deedee becomes dominant while the
prim Alberta proves surprisingly knowing, acknowledging the sexual
nature of Shooter’s language. Deedee accuses her of being racist, taking
an aggressive stance at odds with that in the earlier play (‘If that was a
white DJ comin’ in here, you’d still be talkin’ to him . . . People don’t trust
each other just because they’re some other color from them . . . It just
makes you sick, doesn’t it. The thought of me and Shooter over there
after you go home’ (The Pool Hall,p.)). Both seem to step out of role.
The scene is necessary only in so far as it provides the motivation for
Deedee to enter the action of the second play, carrying the laundry he
has left behind, but her appearance there has already been sufficiently
motivated, the two plays in reality requiring no further connection than
that provided by Norman’s elucidation of character.
 Contemporary American playwrights
Third and Oak: The Pool Hall constitutes a counterpoint to the first play.
Where that had offered an insight into the relationship between two
women, and into their individual sensibilities, this explores the relation-
ship between two men. Beyond that, however, it implies a wider male
community. Once again Norman successfully invokes characters who
never appear but are a felt presence.
Shooter is the son of a pool player who committed suicide when he
began to lose his skill. He had been one of three friends, the other two

being Willie, owner of the pool hall and a character in the play, and
George, crippled and dying, whose daughter is married to the young
Shooter (who borrows his name from the father he wishes to emulate).
Willie behaves like a substitute father to the young Shooter, admonish-
ing him for not going home to his wife, chiding him for his debts. By
degrees we learn of the network of obligation and love which holds
these men together. Willie and George had paid the bills associated with
Shooter’s birth and contributed to the family expenses, while Willie had
arranged for his father’s funeral. Shooter himself, in turn, has bought a
motorised wheelchair for George while Willie is about to sell his pool
hall to pay for George’s hospital treatment. They are to be buried
together.
The pool hall is small and seedy. The men who frequent it seem dis-
contented and their lives aimless. Things are running down. Death and
retirement threaten. Shooter himself has pointless affairs and despite his
public success at the radio station is drawn back to this place in the early
hours of the morning. What lifts them above their circumstances is pre-
cisely their relationship to one another. As in the first part of this double
bill, beneath the apparently inconsequential chatter and the ritual
fencing, is a human truth which slowly makes itself apparent. The lan-
guage, indeed, is primarily a way of keeping what Norman, in a stage
direction, calls a sense of ‘complete emotional panic’ (The Pool Hall,p.)
at bay. Willie senses the pain which lies behind Shooter’s assured front
as he in turn himself detects something of Willie’s despair at an entropic
life. With one friend dead and another dying he now faces life alone.
Their conversation, revealing though it is, is a means of blanking out
what silence will expose.
Willie refuses to play pool with Shooter, in part because he disap-
proves of his behaviour and in part because he cannot reconcile himself
to the death of his friend. Shooter’s appropriation of his father’s

name and his desire to match him at the table are the source of pain.
The game which ends the play, therefore, marks a crucial moment of
Marsha Norman 