SOURCE: "Theater Chronicle: Kopit, Norman, and Shepard," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 77-88.

Here, reviewing Getting Out after its return to New York, Simon offers a detailed and highly laudatory examination of the play.

Marsha Norman's Getting Out is an astonishing first play, especially when you consider that the thirty-one-year-old Louisville woman's only experience of what used to be called the criminal classes comes from having taught severely disturbed children between the ages of four and ten. The delinquents in the play are much older. The heroine is Arlene, a woman in her late twenties, who comes out of an Alabama penitentiary after doing eight years for the holdup of a gas station during which a bystander, a cabbie, came at her with a gun and managed to get killed by her. The apartment she will take over is that vacated by her prostitute...