[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...