SOURCE: "Free, Bright, and 31," in New York Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 46, 13 November 1978, pp. 152, 155.

In the following highly favorable review of the first New York run, Simon declares that the characters in Getting Out are "brutally, sadly, and sometimes thrillingly real. "

The Phoenix Theater started its twenty-fifth season with Getting Out, the first play of Marsha Norman, a 31-year-old Louisville playwright. It is a spiny, realistic play about not exactly prepossessing people, but it is written with such a brisk, fresh, penetrating touch that sordid, brooding things take on the glow of honesty, humanity, very nearly poetry. These disturbed or at least disheveled people—some ex-convicts, and some whose lives have been inter-woven with those of criminals—have intelligence, wit, and pride. They are not sentimentalized, however; not easily reformed, and perhaps never redeemed. But they are brutally, sadly, and sometimes thrillingly real, full of little surprises that play havoc...