SOURCE: "Really 'Going On': Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Winner," in Commonweal, Vol. CX, No. 12, 17 June 1983, pp. 370-71.

In the following review, Weales focuses on the ways in which Jessie and her mother are "caught in a social and psychological web that gives them little room to maneuver. "

Marsha Norman once told an interviewer that her subject was "going on." That is an apt description of Getting Out, the play that introduced the Louisville author to a national audience, and It's a Willingness, which was done on television in 1980. It is a bit more difficult to attach the phrase to 'Night, Mother, the very effective short play that just won Norman the Pulitzer Prize. After all, her protagonist chooses to commit suicide.

"This is how I say what I thought about it all and I say NO," says Jessie, defending her plan to kill herself. "To Dawson and Loretta and...