A courageous woman discovers the toughest prison of all may be the one that has no walls. She wants love and hope after a childhood filled with rebellion.

GETTING OUT is the first produced play by Marsha Norman. Her other plays are THIRD AND OAK ('78), CIRCUS VALENTINE ('79), and THE HOLDUP ('80). She also has written for television and films and is currently work-ing on the book and lyrics for a musical, ORPHAN TRAIN, to be produced this fall.

GETTING OUT won both the Newsday George Oppenheimer Award and the American Theatre Critics Association Award for Best Play of 1979, was selected for Otis Guernsey's "Best Plays: 1978/79," and judged Runner-Up for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Ms. Norman won the 1979 Outer Circle Critics Best Playwright Award for this script.

GETTING OUT was first presented in 1977 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Its New York premiere, at the Phoenix Theatre, was in November of 1978. It then ran at the Theatre de Lys for eight months in 1979. In the fall of 1980, it was sent by the U.S. State Department to the Dublin Festival, the Belgrade Festival, and on tour in Israel. It has been performed in Chinese, German, Dutch, Polish, and Swedish.

Ms. Norman wrote: "The idea (for GETTING OUT) came to me while working with disturbed children at the Ken-tucky Central State Hospital. I was determined it would be truthful about prison...they're built for us all in one form or another."

"To find a way to state the theme of the play is one of the problems of the craft. How exactly do you say to an audience, to yourself, to the character, to the cast and director, to everybody, 'This is what the play is about -- Somebody let me out of here!' -- and say it in a way everybody will understand that she is speaking for everybody who has ever been imprisoned by anything."

Ms. Norman and her husband have left their native Kentucky and are now living in New York City.