Theater: Seared Soul

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GETTING OUT by Marsha Norman

Can the Good Book salvage the Bad Seed? That is the question set forth in this play of raw passion and schizophrenic emotional conflict.

The heroine, Arlene (Susan Kingsley), is a reform school graduate just out from behind bars after serving eight years for prostitution, burglary and manslaughter. She is numbingly inert and on the run at the same time. Shaky, vulnerable and living off her psychological nerve ends, Arlene is determined to go straight.

It soon becomes clear that it is not going to be easy. Her sloppy, vicious cab-driving mother (Madeleine Thornton-Sherwood) turns up to excoriate her. A prison guard (Bob Burrus) has quit his job and accompanied Arlene to her Louisville flat, with the lecherous expectation of shacking up with her. He is an odd mixture of paternal solicitude and cruel menace. Her ex-lover and pimp (Leo Burmester) shows up. A smarmy swaggerer in an orange suit, he proposes to take her off to the rich mean streets of New York.

But Arlene's most insidious enemy is her earlier self, the self she has tried to escape from in a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. By means of slightly disconcerting but compelling asides, the light focuses on that earlier self, the juvenile delinquent "Arlie" (Pamela Reed). Even behind bars, Arlie is a rampant engine of malice. She trashes her food, throws screaming tantrums, fends off with barbed obscenities anyone who tries to help her. Yet some passing unseen chaplain anoints this child's dark, turbulent soul with the balm of the Scriptures.

Will it heal and redeem her? At play's end it is too early to tell. But it is not too early to know that Susan Kingsley is giving one of the memorable performances of the season. Her Arlene is more than brilliant acting; it is a revelation of the human spirit in extremis. Pamela Reed's Arlie has a stinging honesty that stems, in part, from never prettifying a particularly loathsome brat. Getting Out, Marsha Norman's first play, was initially staged at Jon Jory's Actors Theater of Louisville, and had a brief run at Marymount Manhattan's Phoenix last fall. Now tenanted in Greenwich Village at the Theater de Lys, it promises to be one of the prides of off-Broadway.

While the dramatic vitality of Getting Out is undeniable, the play is partly an index of an indecipherable malaise in the society from which it springs. In an admittedly sickly theater season, many of the plays that have received the most critical acclaim and a generous measure of audience acceptance have been about the dying, the grotesque, the brutalized and the desolate. The Elephant Man, winner of this year's New York Drama Critics Circle Award, features a freak who is mon strous, if also in eloquent human pain. Whose Life Is It Anyway? mounts a torch of a brain on the calcified column of a car-wrecked body. In these and other plays of the same tenor, there is much brightly sar donic humor. But what sort of society is it that derives comfort from putting rouge on a corpse?

—T.E. Kalera