The Laundromat by Marsha Norman

First published: 1980

First produced: 1978, at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Type of plot: Naturalistic

Time of work: The late twentieth century

Locale: Ohio

Principal Characters:

• Alberta, a recent widow
• Deedee, a housewife

The Play

The Laundromat takes place at three o’clock in the morning in the dreary, familiar setting of its title. The houselights come up to the song “Stand By Your Man” on the radio, and the play opens with the sound of the disc jockey’s voice signing off for the night. Alberta, a carefully dressed, rather meticulous middle-aged woman, enters with her laundry. Noticing that the attendant is asleep, she turns off the radio static and tacks a notice on the bulletin board before beginning her wash. Almost immediately, a younger woman enters, tripping over a wastebasket and scattering her bundle of clothes on the floor. The conversation that results from this casual encounter between two women, both doing their laundry in the middle of the night, provides the basis for the sketch.

Deedee, the more talkative and energetic of the two, initiates the dialogue by noting that she has already picked clothes off the floor once tonight for her husband, Joe, who “thinks hangers are for when you lock your keys in your car.” From the beginning of the play, Deedee’s joking banter and perky demeanor only thinly disguise her troubled emotions. Although she is aloof at first, Alberta’s good manners force her to respond; however, Deedee is not the kind of person to take a hint. In the extended dialogue that follows, Alberta learns more about Deedee’s life and marriage than she probably cares to know. Deedee’s husband, Joe, supposedly works a double shift at the Ford plant, they live above the Old Mexico Taco Tavern visible through the window of the Laundromat, and she usually washes their clothes at her mother’s house. Deedee wants to have children, but her life centers on Joe: On Saturdays, she watches him drag race his 1964 Chevy, and on Sundays she helps him work on it; with him, she looks forward to “winnin’ a big race. . . .”

Although she loves her husband and admires his mechanical abilities, Deedee’s dissatisfaction with their marriage is also evident. She is angry at being left alone but panicked at the thought of losing Joe; her attempts to make light of her situation quickly give way to expressions of anger and helplessness. Deedee presents herself as scatterbrained, overly talkative, and childlike, but she is not as naïve as she acts. Like Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), Deedee keeps the knowledge of her part-time job (addressing envelopes) from her husband, knowing he would disapprove, just as she keeps from him her own dissatisfaction, fearing he would leave her. Near the end of the play, Deedee confesses to her knowledge of Joe’s affair with the “Weight Control” woman at the bowling alley. As she tells Alberta, “I used to think he just acted mean and stupid. Now I know he really is. . . .”

Although Alberta would prefer to be alone on this night, she gradually gives way to Deedee’s persistent questions, incessant chatter, and obvious need to talk. Her apparent concern helps Deedee to acknowledge her real feelings about “bein’ dumped” by Joe. In turn, Deedee’s tactless questions push Alberta to confront her own reasons for doing laundry in the middle of the night. Alberta first claims that her washing machine is broken, that her husband Herb is on a business trip in Akron, and that she is selling Herb’s garden tools because he gave up gardening. Early in the play, she grabs from Deedee’s hands a cabbage-stained shirt, explaining with unusual emotion that “it needs to presoak” first. Although Alberta is clearly hiding something, it is close to the play’s end before Deedee says to her, “You’re either kidding yourself or lying to me.” Finally the pieces fall together: Herb died last winter, the day before his birthday and its present of garden tools; Alberta has avoided washing his things, especially the cabbage-stained shirt in which he died. Not having cried for forty years, Alberta is quietly grieving, depressed, and unable to sleep. Once Deedee understands Alberta’s situation, she seems genuinely concerned as well as embarrassed by her own self-centered behavior. Alberta not only recognizes Deedee’s good intentions but appears relieved to have told the truth about her husband to someone.

Alberta and Deedee’s point of connection is the experience they have shared as wives, a fact Marsha Norman emphasizes by giving them the same last name (Johnson). Although their husbands’ insensitivity and irritating habits provide the recurrent theme of the anecdotes they share, both women admit to feeling desperately lonely without them. By the end of the play, nothing much has changed: Alberta has not yet washed Herb’s shirt, nor has Deedee decided to return home; however, each helps the other to survive a difficult night. Indeed, the two characters come as close to friendship as their differences in age, social class, education, and personality will allow. The casual nature of the encounter is reinforced when Alberta leaves, tactfully ignoring Deedee’s request for her telephone number. As the house lights go down, Deedee is left alone, soda in hand, silently staring out the window.

Dramatic Devices

The Laundromat carefully adheres to the unities of time, place and action, and Marsha Norman maintains the illusion of reality in a variety of ways. An onstage clock is set to the time of the action and runs throughout the play, the conversation between the two women punctuated by the business of sorting, washing, drying, and folding clothes. The rhythm and routine of domestic work not only helps structure the dialogue but provides a ready-made social connection between the women. Moreover, a laundromat is one of the few public places women might be found in the middle of the night, and the chore that draws them there is as boring, repetitive, and unsatisfying as the rest of their lives.

The set, too, is both realistic and potentially emblematic. As Norman describes it, the laundromat is a “standard, dreary” one that might be found anywhere: Its “dirty ashtrays” and “ugly chairs littered with magazines” pay tribute to the meaningless waiting endured by earlier customers. Despite such depressing surroundings, however, the Laundromat provides these women a well-lit haven in the night—a place to escape, if only temporarily, the darker reality of their own solitary existence. It is important to note that the play begins with the song “Stand By Your Man” and the voice of a late-night radio disc jockey signing off for the night: “And the rest of you night owls gonna have to make it through the rest of this night by yourself, or with the help of your friends, if you know what I mean.” Thus Norman subtly and economically introduces her subject matter before the characters arrive onstage. The women are indeed “night owls” whose very presence in the laundromat is related to their underlying desire to remain loyal to their men, almost to the point of absurdity.

The humor, dramatic tension, and emotional charge of The Laundromat ultimately depends on the stark contrast between the play’s two characters. A former schoolteacher, Alberta is mature, quiet, kind, and self-contained; Deedee, whose education and experience are quite limited, is self-deprecating, chatty, and openly expressive. Alberta represses her emotions while Deedee’s outbursts edge on hysteria. Differences in age and personality are further set off by subtle distinctions in social class: Alberta lives in a house with a garden, has traveled, and owns clothes that are “mostly hand wash.” Deedee has no washing machine, lives in an apartment above a tavern, goes to drag races on the weekend, and has trouble naming seven presidents. As the evening progresses, both the misunderstandings and moments of connection take on serious overtones, but the characters’ ability to laugh at themselves saves the play from becoming sentimental. Norman slowly exposes the emotional reality that motivates two potentially stereotypical characters.

Critical Context

With its suggestion of what it really means for women to “get out,” The Laundromat develops the central image of Marsha Norman’s first play, Getting Out (pr. 1977, pb. 1979), but in a more lighthearted, comic vein. Like Arlene, who finds her release from prison in Getting Out is to another kind of cell with a different set of limited options, the women in The Laundromat find that simply getting on with life is a difficult, sometimes overwhelming task. In Norman’s later play, ’night, Mother (pr. 1982, pb. 1983), Jessie does not even try: Suicide presents for her the most appropriate alternative to a meaningless, repetitive existence. With its mother-daughter dynamic, naturalistic style, and central focus on women, The Laundromat clearly looks forward to ’night, Mother, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning status represented for many a major breakthrough for women’s theater. Unlike those of many of her British contemporaries, however, Norman’s plays are neither feminist nor directly political in nature. For some, Norman’s use of traditional forms and conventional themes represented a betrayal of the more politicized community of American women playwrights and helped account for her swift critical and box office success.

That the emotions and concerns Norman explores in her plays are not limited to women is made clear in The Laundromat’s one-act companion piece The Pool Hall (pr. 1978). It is about the close relationship between two black men, Shooter (a popular disc jockey) and Willie (a sixty-year-old pool hall owner), who have had a falling-out after the suicide of the younger man’s father and older man’s best friend. As in The Laundromat, the father-son pair in The Pool Hall spend the night talking, and by doing so, begin to heal the rifts that their shared grief, fear, anger, and misunderstanding have caused. In Traveler in the Dark (pr. 1984, pb. 1988), Sam, a famous surgeon, works through the grief and remorse caused by the death of his head nurse through verbal confrontations involving his wife, son, and father on the afternoon of the funeral. Both plays have been criticized for incipient sentimentality, and neither enjoyed the immediate success of Norman’s earlier, “women-centered” plays.

Because the suffering of Norman’s characters, whether male or female, involves questions of identity, Norman’s plays are usually grounded in a family context—either literally or metaphorically. Such a focus places her firmly in the tradition of American playwrights from Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, all of whom elaborate their political and psychological themes within in a familial context; Norman herself has cited Thornton Wilder and Lanford Wilson from this tradition as possible sources of inspiration.

Although occasionally criticized for stage situations that seem contrived or gimmicky (for example, an accidental meeting in a laundromat, or a daughter’s announcement to her mother of her intention to commit suicide), Norman has been lauded for her unsparing and direct confrontation of painful psychological realities, for her authentic dialogue, and for the creation of memorable characters. The fact that she is alternately praised for her realism and blamed for her lack of it illustrates how important the experiences and assumptions each viewer brings to the theater may be in determining a play’s final effect. Most would agree, however, that Norman’s perspective has provided a significant contribution to contemporary theater.

Sources for Further Study

Brown, Linda Gitner. Marsha Norman: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1996.

Gross, Amy. “Marsha Norman.” Vogue, June, 1983, 104.

Spencer, Jenny S. “Marsha Norman’s She-Tragedies.” In Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, edited by Lynda Hart. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.

Stout, Kate. “Marsha Norman: Writing for the Least of Our Brethren.” Saturday Review 9 (September/October, 1983): 28-33.