SOURCE: "New Voices Using New Realism: Fuller, Henley, and Norman," in Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 125-54.

In the following excerpt, Demastes examines Norman's efforts to convey complex but inarticulate characters in 'night, Mother.

With Marsha Norman's play 'night, Mother (1982; Pulitzer Prize 1983), the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a play with designs more closely related to feminist concerns than Beth Henley's more Southern pieces. Norman's focus is on women, and her plays present worlds filled with commonplace events and common people, those not in privileged positions in society. Their portrayals in turn reveal worlds and lives that are essentially meaningless. These simple lives, though, extend beyond those people living them. The effect is more general, as Jack Kroll in a review of Norman's Traveler in the Dark (1984) observes: "Marsha Norman is one of those writers who are natural lightning rods for the...