Emily Mann speaks of the tendency of women to sit around and talk to each other about their memories of devastating events in their lives. Sometimes, she suggests, it is family members, touching on exposed wounds, sometimes it is ‘perfect strangers … [who] sit and talk like other people talking about the weather or sports, except that it's about their divorce … We often see the pain in one another and then we talk about it.’ Though Louisville-born Marsha Norman hesitates to see herself as specifically a woman playwright it would, on the face of it, be hard to find a better description of aspects of her plays from Getting Out through to 'night Mother. For not only does she find in dialogue between women a way of opening up channels to emotional needs and anxieties but she is aware of the degree to which theatre itself depends on dialogue, a dialogue not restricted to the stage.

Describing the nature of the playwright's relationship to the community, she observes that ‘you can really see it when writers' work is part of a continuing dialogue’, regretting only that ‘the audience is no longer in touch with that dialogue’ because ‘you can't write out of a tradition that the audience knows – unless you write TV plays’. However, as Third and Oak: The Pool Hall makes plain, men, too, are part of this community and as such are no less vulnerable, no less capable of revealing themselves and their fears, than are women.