Contemporary American Playwrights - Marsha Norman

  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-  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  Contemporary American playwrights 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  [...]... ) Norman followed Third and Oak with a play whose only performance was ‘a total disaster’8 and which she therefore refused to publish until  8 Marsha Norman, Four Plays by Marsha Norman (New York, ) Marsha Norman  Circus Valentine, produced in Louisville in , features a young trapeze artist who in speaking of her craft – ‘It’s all Time, see, and learning how to fall’ (Marsha Norman, ... essence a statement, on Norman s part, about the role of women in society As Linda Kintz explained, if that is quite the word, Norman s ’night Mother stages the space of women’s worthless domestic work and its aesthetic invisibility, initially foregrounding the spacial or organizational role of architecture in a set representing an isolated middle-class or lower-middle-class Marsha Norman  house in... the only thing she has to offer to her mother As Norman remarks, ‘Knowing is the most profound kind of love, giving someone the gift of knowledge about yourself.’10 There is, though, surely a sense in which Norman does less than 10 Janet Brown, Taking Centre Stage: Feminism in Contemporary US Drama (Metuchen, NJ, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights justice to her own character in suggesting... Contemporary American playwrights 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 sensibility she has at last transcended Norman has spoken of... of possibility in the face  Contemporary American playwrights of a dismaying reality Even in the context of a failing circus in an anonymous small town they battle to retain their integrity and refuse to allow failure to define their lives Norman s next play, The Holdup, based in part on her own family history, was something of a shock Presented in April , by the American Conservatory Theatre... late thirties, early forties, her mother twenty years older The daughter finds life painful and disturbing, the mother straightforward For one it is a mystery, for 9 Marsha Norman, ’night Mother (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights the other, apparently, simply the given, to be accommodated Thelma adjusts to problems, settling for what she can get She fills her time eating junk food,... playwriting It is equally undeniable that, no doubt as a consequence, the relationship between mothers and daughters has remained largely unexplored territory and Marsha Norman not merely maps out that territory in ’night  Contemporary American playwrights Mother, thereby dramatising its centrality to the culture, but offers a cogent and fascinating explanation of the nature and meaning of that relationship:... that the asso- Marsha Norman  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... 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 ) 7 Marsha Norman, Third and Oak: The Laundromat (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights 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... MI, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights Indeed the only one symbolically to walk through that door in the play, until the final moment, is a man, Jessie’s father and Thelma’s husband, a man no less detached from the imperatives of the American dream than the women The next, it seems likely, will be Jessie’s son, already rushing towards oblivion Not the least of Norman s accomplishments . sexual designs on her. Her Marsha Norman  3 Marsha Norman, Marsha Norman: Collected Plays (Lyme, NH, ), p. . 4 Marsha Norman, Getting Out (New York,. refused to publish until .  Contemporary American playwrights 8 Marsha Norman, Four Plays by Marsha Norman (New York, ). Circus Valentine, produced