Stage:

...Cecil left for pretty much the same reason...

...That is not enough for Jessie...

...Her mother, who admits at one point that she has an intense fear of death, has mastered the limitations of her life by embracing the small activities and inactivities that fill a day with busy work which has no meaning beyond itself...

...Her epilepsy, or so she believes, was the result of a fall from a horse, which she was riding only to please Cecil...

...This activity is, in part, a dramatic strategy of Norman's, a way of using such practicality to emphasize that Jessie's planned suicide is not an act of madness or revenge...

...Much of the play has to do with the details of keeping house, ordering groceries, retaining the comfort, because Jessie, who has been taking care of the house since she moved back in with her mother, is intent on preparing her mother for her approaching absence...

...The set for the play consists of two rooms - kitchen and living room - in the house that Jessie shares with her mother, a playing area marked by a door that leads into Jessie's bedroom, into "absolute nothingness," as Norman's script says...

...The mother's loveless marriage, which she remembers with distaste but with no indication that an alternative was possible, is another example of the way in which these women are the creatures of not-so-great expectations, caught in a social and psychological web that gives them very little room to maneuver...

...Jessie learns that she has had epilepsy all her life (it was the cause not the result of the fall) and that her mother, through some odd sense of propriety, kept the disease a secret even from her and, in the process, made it impossible for Jessie to function in the world...

...I don't like how things are...

...And hope...

...Norman's "going on" has relevance to 'Night, Mother, after all, for "going on," which here becomes not going on, presupposes an attempt to wrest control of a life from outside forces...

...The sense of helplessness that most of us feel in the face of events in the world at large provides a macrocosmic malaise for the smaller space of the play in which Jessie and her mother have few choices about what to make of their lives...

...For the first time, in choosing her death, Jessie elects to act rather than be acted upon...

...And me...

...Just a way of saying NO...

...This list contains the elements of the trap which Jessie sees her life to be, and by the end of the evening - which she had hoped would be a final ordinary evening with her mother, but which turns into her mother's argumentative attempt to keep her alive - we know these people well, both the two on stage and those we never see...

...GERALD WEALESALD WEALES...

...That is an apt description of Getting Out, the play that introduced the Louisville author to a national audience, and It's a Willingness, which was done on television in 1980...

...and she assumes, with reason, that she is partly responsible for both departures...

...It is a bit more difficult to attach the phrase to 'Night, Mother, the very effective short play that just won Norman the Pulitzer Prize...

...To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cecil and you...

...The restrictions implicit in her epilepsy, in the response to it rather than the disease itself, reflect a society of limited possibilities, mandatory roles...

...I read the papers," Jessie says...

...It is a theatrical not a theological description, I assume, an indication that this door is the only exit from the enclosed space - and enclosed it is by a tight frame built around the proscenium and edged in black...

...After all, her protagonist chooses to commit suicide...

...Dawson is Jessie's condescending brother and Loretta, her self-absorbed sister-in-law, who are so little aware of Jessie as a person that Dawson gives his sister bedroom slippers every year for Christmas but always in the size that his wife wears...

...And they're not any better out there than they are in here...

...I say NO...

...Cecil is the husband who left her and Ricky, the son who has become a petty criminal...

...I fell off the horse because I didn't know how to hold on," she says...

...A joke that is not a joke, as is so much that Jessie says, her ironic criticism of Dawson is an example of the often funny, always wrong remarks through which Jessie conveys her pain...

...The "Red Chinese," who make their incongruous appearance in Jessie's catalogue, are only ostensibly one of her little jokes...

...Early in the play, when her mother asks what she is sad about, Jessie says, "Oh, everything from you and me to Red China," and her mother answers, "I think we can leave the Chinese out of this...

...This is how I say what I thought about it all and I say NO," says Jessie, defending her plan to kill herself...

...The rooms are furnished with the kind of comfortable lack of distinction which marks houses where ordinary people live, and Jessie and her mother, in the very fine performances by Kathy Bates and Anne Pitoniak, are just such people in both their pain and their preoccupation with the everyday artifacts of living...

...The line gets a laugh, as it should, but although the outside world makes a minimal appearance in this play, we cannot really leave out the Red Chinese, in their metaphorical role as forces outside the confines of the house in which the action takes place...