Getting Out

Getting out is a play written by Marsha Norman about a young woman “Arlie” who’s messed up childhood and family led her to becoming a criminal and led her to ending up in jail. She was a prostitute, a murderer, and a thief. Unlike “The Bad Seed”, she wasn’t just naturally bad, but she lived in a bad environment that made her become that way. Her mom was also a prostitute, her siblings all had problems as well and her family was really poor. I guess she wanted to make her life better by earning easy money through prostitution and learned to become defensive towards everyone in her life by acting bad.

What’s interesting about this play is it doesn’t actually take place in her jail cell but takes place in her small broken down apartment when she’s finally out after eight whole years of being in jail. We are now introduced to two different Arlene’s. We get to see Arlene who is the good version of the Arlie from the past who was bad. The whole play basically focuses on the flashbacks Arlene encounters with her enemy, who is herself from the past. We realize that Arlene wants to change but her past memories are still getting in the way. There are other things that get in the way also. One thing is her mom, who we see doesn’t really get along with her and tells her that she’s basically not going to change and she assumes that she slept with the prison guard. Another person we see is Carl who is her ex boyfriend and pimp who visits her a couple times to try to talk her into prostitution again. He tells her that the only way she can really get her life together and earn big money fast is to prostitute. He also tries to lure her back into doing this by mentioning her son, who we see is a really big influence in the play for why Arlene wants to change so much, although he is not physically in the play. Carl tells Arlene that she would be making more money through prostitution and would be able to send Joey, her son gifts and her son would be proud that his mom is rich. However, towards the end we see that Arlene is a stronger character than Arlie and makes the right decision to not go with Carl. Ruby, her neighbor who was also an ex-convict plays another big role in the play by telling her not to give up and things will get better for her. She finally convinces her to not go back to the past because she shares her own story with her, of how she through a jug of milk outside the window and instead of breaking and spilling, it bounced back up meaning her life can do the same.

In my opinion, I didn’t like this play as much as I did the other modern plays that we read, such as “Trifles” and “The Bad Seed”. I didn’t like it because to me, it didn’t really have a plot. We just get to see her bad self and her good self. I guess this play would be better to watch than to read, because it gets a little confusing when Arlie jumps right in the middle of a scene. However, I did like the symbolism of the jug of milk. I did like the fact that Arlie became a strong character to resist some opportunities that came to her to get her to take the easy way out again. I also like how she encounters some bad people and some good people and get to see which side she decides to take which wasn’t really obvious because she lived a life of crime all her life. Bennie seems like a very random character in the play because we don’t really get to know for sure if he’s a good or bad character. He’s seen as being the nice guard while she was in jail and drives across the country to get her settled in, but then he tries to rape her who I found to be odd. He just seemed kind of creepy to me since he was like 50. I would think he would be more like a fatherly figure.

I enjoyed reading the article about women having to keep their babies with them in the prison. Im not really sure if that is a good idea or bad idea. It’s good that the babies are with their mothers and maybe they will be a good influence on the mothers to help them become better people for the sake of their kids however I don’t think that they should be in that type of atmosphere. But the article was quiet interestin