SOURCE: Kane, Leslie. “The Way Out, the Way In: Paths to Self in the Plays of Marsha Norman.” In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, pp. 255-74. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Kane offers a critical reading of several of Norman's plays, drawing focus to Norman's recurrent themes of mother-daughter conflict, the struggle for personal autonomy, and the quest for a sense of self.

… to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time, it is eternity's demand upon him.

Soren Kierkegaard¹

As a writer, you go in to the theatre to search, and if you do your work you find something. Or at least you identify the path.

Marsha Norman, interviewed by Sherilyn Beard

A playwright of power and perception, Marsha Norman dramatizes the personal crises of...