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'Night, Mother
written by Marsha Norman
directed by Martin Buxbaum
with Bronwynn Mertz, Kathy Tanner
Assistant Director: Eszter Hollosi
Stage Manager: Margit Atzler, Georg Drennig
Sound & Lighting: Heike Wiesner, Robby Vamos
Costumers & Set Design: Jessica Short / team
Props: Katherine Frew
Dramaturgical Research: Jessie Augustyn
Facts
November 11-30, 2002
Mon - Sat, 7.45 p.m.
Ensemble Theater
Petersplatz 1, 1010 Vienna
About the play
A story about a mother and her daughter, of isolation and despair.
The play opens with what appears to be just another Saturday night in Jessie and Thelma’s home. But this all changes when Jessie asks the question, “Where’s Daddy’s gun?” She makes her intentions clear that she is going to kill herself. Will she or won’t she? And why?
About the author
Born in 1947 as the daughter of a fundamentalist Methodist, Marsha Norman had a solitary childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother's religious views prohibited Norman from playing with other children and watching television and movies, and she credits her loneliness as a child as the reason why she became a writer.
Playing the piano, reading books, and attending the theatre were permitted to her and she saw children's plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, as well as later productions of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Archibald MacLeish's J.B., an adaptation of The Book of Job. A philosophy major at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, Norman began to work as a journalist after graduation, writing articles and reviews of books, plays, and films for the Louisville Times.
Norman's first play, Getting Out (1977), resulted from a suggestion by Jon Jory, a theatre director who asked her to write a play for the Actors Theatre. At first she felt she had no models to follow as a playwright, but she soon found that she could draw on her experience working with disturbed adolescents at Kentucky Central State Hospital. This background enabled her to create a vivid portrait of a woman parolee who served an eight-year prison sentence for robbery, kidnapping, and manslaughter. Getting Out was voted the best new play produced by a regional theatre by the American Theatre Critics Association and appeared in a shortened version in The Best Plays of 1977-1978.
After the success of this play, Norman moved to New York City because, as she said, she "needed to be in the world of living writers... I like seeing that there are some people who do what I do, who are still alive." She wrote some one-act plays for the Actors Theatre and another full-length play, Circus Valentine (1979), before 'Night, Mother (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize in addition to several other awards and four Tony Award nominations. Four years later she published her first novel, The Fortune Teller, and followed it with Four Plays (1988), the Broadway musical The Secret Garden (1991), and Trudy Blue (1994).
Since 1994 Marsha Norman has served on the faculty of The Juilliard School.
Teachers
Teacher Material for all vienna theatre project productions is available in PDF format to download from this website. Please visit our Education section to find the required documents which are available free of charge.The material available includes background information about the author, the play, main themes, characters, reading suggestions, possible teaching objectives, dialogues for discussion, assignments and vocabulary (English-German).
For further enquiries please contact education@viennatheatreproject.at