[Getting Out] is a spiny, realistic play about not exactly pre-possessing 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 interwoven 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 with our expectations, yet, on reflection, prove devastatingly believable and, therefore, right.

The story unfurls parallelly in the past and present, with the heroine as a young girl, Arlie, going from bad to worse while, elsewhere on the stage, she is Arlene, a young woman returning after a long stretch in the penitentiary (for holdup with homicide) to...