suicide talk

suicide talk

We've got a good life here," says Thelma Cates to her daughter, Jessie, in Marsha Norman's new play, 'Night, Mother. Many would agree. Thelma, who is a widow, and Jessie, who is divorced, live together in a spick-and-span house on a country road somewhere in the New South. There are no money problems. Nights are spent in such relaxed pursuits as crocheting and watching television.
But on the particular, ordinary Saturday night that we meet Thelma ... and Jessie ... , we learn that the good life may not be so good after all. As the daughter prepares to perform her weekly ritual of giving her mother a manicure, she says calmly, almost as a throwaway line, "I'm going to kill myself, Mama." And, over the next 90 minutes, Mama--and the rest of us--must face the fact that Jessie is not kidding....
['Night, Mother] is a shattering evening, but it looks like simplicity itself. A totally realistic play, set in real time counted by onstage clocks, it shows us what happens after Jessie makes her announcement. What happens, unsurprisingly, is that the first skeptical and then terrified mother tries to cajole and talk her child out of suicide. "People don't really kill themselves," argues Thelma, "unless they're retarded or deranged."
But Jessie isn't deranged--she's never felt better in her life--and that's why 'Night, Mother is more complex than it looks, more harrowing than even its plot suggests. Miss Norman's play is simple only in the way that an Edward Hopper painting is simple. As she perfectly captures the intimate details of two individual, ordinary women, this playwright locates the emptiness that fills too many ordinary homes on too many faceless streets in the vast country we live in now....
Although it is likely to kindle many debates about the subject, 'Night, Mother is not a message play about the choice to commit suicide. It's about contemporary life and what gives it--or fails to give it--value. We first get a sense of the Cates's existence before...