The intellectual blockbuster of the 1983 Broadway season has been Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother at the John Golden Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. To stand outside the Golden Theatre around nine-thirty in the evening was an education in itself. Young and old, chic and dowdy: they emerged slowly, too moved to speak. Elegantly bepearled matrons fished blindly in their purses for a handkerchief; red-eyed stockbrokers, visibly shaken, went pensively off to hail a cab; ruthlessly tailored women clutching huge wads of Kleenex were guided to their limousines by sympathetic hands. Seldom had so many, so well dressed, appeared so moved. The gutters of Forty-fifth Street ran with mascara and even the embroidered polo-ponies and alligators seemed to weep for Jessie Cates, whose life had been so empty, so trapped in hopeless disappointment, that her only desire had been to pass mildly away, affording the least possible pain and inconvenience to those she’d loved and those to whom she’d meant so little.

Marsha Norman’s smash-hit tragedy posed a problem for this year’s serious theatergoer. Let’s face it: it sounded like a downer. Unfortunately, it also sounded like one of those must-see cultural events. In addition to a Pulitzer, ’night, Mother had won the acclaim of some of Broadway’s severest critics who spoke of the play with the excitement and respect they generally save for only the most momentous theatrical achievement. Not only Mel Gussow and Jack Kroll, but even John Simon and Robert Brustein made ’night, Mother sound like another