SOURCE: Coen, Stephanie. “Marsha Norman's Triple Play.” American Theatre 8, no. 12 (March 1992): 22-7.

In the following essay, Coen posits that Norman's body of work characterizes her as a feminist playwright whose dramas typically portray women struggling to gain control of their lives.

Marsha Norman has spent the past two months shuttling among three states. In her native Kentucky, D. Boone, a new play she describes as “wildly romantic,” is in repertory at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of new American Plays through March 28. Sarah and Abraham, a deeply personal work that has been in gestation for five years, just completed a month-long run at New Jersey's George Street Playhouse. In New York, there have been meetings with her collaborators to plan road-tour changes in The Secret Garden, the Broadway show many said could not be made and would not succeed—for which Norman, in an auspicious musical-theatre debut...