In this review, Oilman admires the artistic merits of 'night, Mother yet, in light of the play's subject matter, questions the accolades bestowed upon Norman's work.

Oilman is an American educator and critic whose works include The Making of Modern Drama (1974) and Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (1979).

The hyperbole machine is operating on Broadway again, Upon a modest two-character play with nothing flagrantly wrong with it but not much to get excited about either the reviewers have lavished nearly their whole stock of ecstatic adjectives, to which encomiums a Pulitzer Prize has just been added. Even before MarshaNorman's 'night, Mother reached New York City, Robert Brustein likened it to Long Day's Journey Into Night. (That Brustein's American Repertory Theater had given the play its premiere, in Boston, might have had something to do with that wild comparison.) Well, O'Neill's best play and Norman's do...