The most important thing to understand about ‘night, Mother before going to the theater is that it takes place in real time. The play is literally about the last 90 minutes or so in the life of Jessie Cates. In professional productions of this drama, there is no intermission. Such an artificial break in the tension would serve to undermine the play’s relentless march toward its gruesome and tragically heartbreaking end.
Relentless is the proper word to describe the narrative that is told in Marsha Norman’s play. It is the story of a daughter informing her mother that she is going to take her own life. Were ‘night, Mother a television episode, the next 90 minutes would contain discourse that leads directly toward Jessie Cates having her mind changed. She would listen to all the reasons laid out against her decision to commit suicide and she would wind up changing her mind. Had ‘night, Mother been introduced to the world in the 1800’s, the final echo of the gunshot that blows off Jessie’s head behind closed doors would be less shocking. As a revelation of the human condition, in fact, it might have little shock value at all. Instead, however, ‘night, Mother was produced for the first time in 1983 and more than three decades of televised happy endings serves to create a false context in which the drama makes the leap from melodrama to tragedy.
The lack of an intermission in the professional productions of Norman’s play is essentially a rejection of the manner in which advertising served at the time to undermine the emotional trajectory of nearly every television viewing experience. Modern audiences raised on cable subscriptions and internet streaming do not face the same conventional expectations that audiences had been conditioned to expect when the play premiered. Nevertheless, most of those shows that air even on cable and are watched through streaming still present a world of happy endings where the announcement of intent to commit suicide usually sets the stage for a dramatic intervention which results in a change of mind. Even among today’s so-called “edgy” dramas where even the lives of leading characters is subject to death typically stage that death for dramatic purposes in the form of a shocking and unexpected plot twist.
One of the reasons that ‘night, Mother had and still possess the power to utterly shake an audience to its emotional core and stimulate discourse over the relative value and morality of suicide is the relentlessness of its portrayal of a woman who announces her intent to die and then, after an amount of time relatively coincident with that of a “very special episode of a TV drama,” actually goes through with the horrific deed.
