Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity

Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity JENNY S. SPENCER By the time I saw a production ofNonnan's play'night. Mother, it was a highly acclaimed Broadway success that had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I Like most of the audience, I knew the play ended with a suicide. But being anned against an indulgently emotional response did not prevent me from having one. What I experienced as almost overwhelmingly painful, however, was viewed with utter indifference by the otherwise sensitive men in my company. The post-production discussion re-affinned what I found to be a surprising difference between men's and women's responses to this play. Most of the discussion was among female viewers, who found the play intensely disturbing, realistic, and utterly riveting. Only a few men attended and fewer spoke at that session; several had left the perfonnance early. Itappeared that for most of them the play seemed too limited in focus, too predictable in effect to capture their interest completely. A subsequent survey of reviews revealed a similar disparity of reaction. although not entirely along lines of gender. John Simon and Frank Rich applauded Nonnan's ability to weave a shattering existential experience out of the most homely of materials" But Stanley Kauffman and Richard Gilman envied the "rapture" of others, finding Nonnan's play blatantly contrived on the one hand and utterly boring on the other. Gilman, in particular, captures the predominant male attitude Iwitnessed with this comment: "When the shot sounded, I wasn't startled, dismayed, or much moved; it was all 'sort of' sad, 'sort of' lugubrious.'" Clearly the success of'night. Mother rests on the peculiar power of the play in perfonnance; it works for audiences, when it does work, on a number of levels - the naturalistic illusion so carefully maintained that the play, like unmediated experience itself, appears open to multiple interpretation. However , I would like to suggest the possibility that male and female audience members "read," comprehend, and respond to the play in ways fundamentally different. While universal themes of death and desire, of human dignity and Norman's '/light, Mother human pain, ofhope and existential despair are accessible to all, these seem but "secondary elaborations" of the primary drama that women may cathartically experience in Norman's play. If we accept the psychoanalytic premise that given the specific pressures, complications, and resolutions offered the female child within the Oedipal situation, the process whereby men and women gain their sexual identity is not identical, then it stands to reason that a literary work in which such issues are represented should provide for the audience ofeach sex adifferent kindofexperience. 'night,Mother provides an interesting case since it both self-consciously addresses a female audience and subconsciously works upon the female psyche in powerful ways, positioning male and female viewers differently in the process. Indeed, because of the way in which the text foregrounds issues of female identity and feminine autonomy, focuses on the mother-daughter relationship, and controls the narrative movement, the relatively detached position available (however tentatively) to male viewers simply cannot (without great risk) be taken up by women. 'night, Mother is not the first play by Norman to address women and issues which are potentially gender-specific. Gelling Out (1977) is quite literally about identity crisis, and its theme of the split self is visually represented on a split stage that alternates between past and present versions ofthe same person. In this play, Arlene, a newly released prisoner, tentatively begins her new life on the "outside," having apparently lost touch with the aggressively malicious juvenile delinquent she once was, with the Arlie who haunts her memory in compelling flashback sequences. Not only is the play's present and remembered violence sexual in nature, but in the process of "personality adjustment" that unfolds, physical abuse becomes a metaphor for the entire contradictory process of female socialization. As the play's title indicates, Gelling Out addresses the female protagonist's specific hopes and the audience's more generalized desire to escape social entrapment; and yet the play's variety of enclosures suggests the ways in which feminine consciousness is constructed, maimed, reconstructed, and...