Night, Mother

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a Drama Desk award, ’Night, Mother is set in the living room/kitchen of a small house on an isolated country road. The home is shared by Jessie and her mother. Jessie’s father is dead; her loveless marriage ended in divorce; her absent son is a petty thief and ne’er-do-well; her last job didn’t work out and in general, her life is stale and unprofitable. As the play begins, Jessie asks for her father’s service revolver and calmly announces that she intends to kill herself. At first her mother, Thelma, refuses to take her seriously, but as Jessie sets about tidying the house and making lists of things to be looked after, her sense of desperate helplessness begins to build. In the end, with the inexorability of genuine tragedy, Thelma can only stand by, stunned and unbelieving, as Jessie quietly closes and locks her bedroom door and ends her profound unhappiness in one fatal, stunning and deeply disturbing moment – a moment never to be forgotten by those who have witnessed, and come to understand, her plight.