“When I first came to New York – when the Arts Council in Louisville, Ky., first sent me, I heard this man in the back of the room say, ‘Isn’t it amazing to hear smart things coming out of Southern mouths?'” Marsha Norman said. “Getting Out,” her first play, was performed off-Broadway in 1977-78. “I resolved to eliminate the accent,” she said, as the refrigerator in her SoHo loft hummed behind her.

The writer sat at an oak table in her kitchen, with two neat piles of unopened mail, a Starbucks cup, and a marshmallow Rice Krispie treat in front of her, and talked about the Broadway revival of her Pulitzer Prizewinning play “‘Night, Mother” which is currently in previews and opens Sunday.

Getting up to grab a copy of “‘Night, Mother,” she read from the script’s “Author’s Note.”

“Under no circumstances should the set and its dressing make a judgment about the intelligence or taste of Jessie and Thelma. Heavy accents, which would further distance the audience from Jessie and Thelma, are also wrong.” In the current production, she explained, the dialect coach settled on an accent based somewhere in Ohio.

“‘Night, Mother” is Ms. Norman’s fifth play and won her the Pulitzer in 1983, the year it first came to Broadway starring Kathy Bates as Jessie, the suicidal daughter, and Anne Pitoniak as “Mama.”

When asked whom she wanted to play Mama this time around, she immediately said, “Brenda Blethyn” – the venerable English actress who starred in Mike Leigh’s 1996 film “Secrets and Lies.” For the role of Jessie, Edie Falco of “The Sopranos,” who previously appeared on Broadway in the play “Sideman” and Terence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,” seemed perfect. Both signed on.

“Audiences love her,” Ms. Norman said of Ms. Falco. “They care about her. They want to hear what she has to say.”

Ms. Norman compared the revival to the original production 20 years ago, particularly with regard to the set. “They’re really different – wildly. Before, it was a strict horizontal box – difficult to light. It had a lid. Now the set is angular. It places emphasis on the door. The important thing is that the door is the focus.”

Ms. Norman went on to speak of the play’s emotional undercurrent. “People make an assumption when you write a play like this. Everybody assumes I know a lot [about suicide], and that I’m really interested in it,” she said. Adding that she has firm opinions on what “should have happened” in the play, she said, “I could not imagine saying to anyone, ‘Okay, kill yourself.'”

“If she just had people who got how funny she is,” Ms. Norman said of Jessie, the Edie Falco character. “Mama and Jessie don’t laugh at each other’s jokes. Each needs a better audience. That’s who comes to see them every night.”

Has she known anyone who had committed suicide? “Three or four,” she said. “All happened quickly. Spalding Gray was a friend-someone I was around all the time.” Gray died earlier in the year after jumping off the Staten Island Ferry.

In “‘Night, Mother,” Brenda Blethyn, as Mama, makes cocoa from scratch for Jessie. “I had a step-grandmother who would always ‘priss’ around and say ‘the salt is the trick,'” said Ms. Norman. “I like Nestle Quik, myself,” she added.

One of four children, Ms. Norman was born Marsha Williams, in 1947 in Louisville, Ky., to Christian fundamentalist parents – Billie Lee Williams, an insurance salesman and realtor, and Bertha Mae, a housewife. She grew up on Bourbon Street and went to “a little school at the end of the street, in a neighborhood of brick houses with lots of trees,” she said. “It was beautiful in the fall.” Searching to describe it, she called it, “Straightforward – not anything remarkable. It was a confined, locked-up universe.”

At Louisville’s Deride High School, Ms. Norman worked on the newspaper, and one of her essays won a local writing contest. After high school, she got a scholarship to Agnes Scott College, in Decatur, Ga., where she majored in philosophy. She graduated in 1969 and returned to Louisville, got married, and worked with disturbed children at Kentucky Central State Hospital for two years, earning her master’s at the University of Louisville in 1971.

In 1973, she taught filmmaking to gifted children at the Brown School. By 1976, she was reviewing books for the Louisville Times and editing a children’s supplement called the Jelly Bean Journal for the paper.

Through her writing for children, she came into contact with the artistic director of the Actors Theater of Louisville, who suggested she write a play. In 1977-78, she became the playwright-in-residence at Actors Theater in Louisville and then at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1979. Her second marriage, to theatrical producer Dann C. Byck Jr. had begun a year earlier, in 1978.

In 1987, Ms. Norman married Timonthy Dykman, with whom she had two children (they later divorced). In 1991, she won a Tony Award for writing the book for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”

Her son, who is 17, “is going to be a wonderful film critic,” she said. Though he may end up writing about cars, where he’s developed quite an expertise. “We get 10 phone calls a week, with people asking him for advice about cars.” Ms. Norman spends part of the week in the city and the rest in East Hampton with her children.

This Sunday, her son plans to attend opening night of “‘Night, Mother,” while her daughter will represent her at a screening of “Samantha,” one of her other projects.

“I’m on the road all the time,” she said. She listens to audible.com and Books on Tape. When she’s in the subway in New York, she plays bridge. “On my Palm,” she said, although she’d be eager to hear of “any bridge clubs with theater people.”

“I like to travel,” Ms. Norman said. “I love tubs of hot water. I spend a lot of time in the whirlpool at Chelsea Piers.” She described herself as an expert on the location of hot springs all over, particularly in Montana, where her favorite brother, who builds boats, lives. “Let me show you a picture,” she said, getting up to retrieve a 3-by-5 Polaroid of a handsome bearded man holding an impressive fish.

She has most recently written a script for a musical based on Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” It arrives on Broadway next fall.

“It was a fabulous story to work on,” she said. It just completed a successful test run in Atlanta. There were “40 standing a night,” she said. “The audience was half-black, half-white, half young, half-old. It broke the records.”

Her connection with Alice Walker goes back more than 20 years: “Alice and I won Pulitzers the same day.”