In the final moments of This Wide Night, a younger ex-convict named Marie and an older ex-convict named Lorraine—who's just gotten out of prison and is staying with her former cellmate—listen to the rain. Marie says that it has stopped raining and they both stand still for a moment. Behind them, at the back of the stage, a floor-to-ceiling curtain of plastic disposable water bottles hangs in the light (courtesy of set designer Jen Zeyl). It looks like a permanent deluge.

"The implication is that it goes on and on and on," real-life ex-convict Theresa Matheson, who had seen the show on opening weekend, told me in an interview the day afterward. For some people, she said, "it just never stops raining."

Two months ago, Matheson finished her 11-year stint in the Washington State women's prison in Purdy. This Wide Night was the third play she'd seen since she got out. (It ran at Purdy, but she saw it at Seattle Public Theatre.)

She recommends it. This Wide Night, by British playwright Chloe Moss, takes place in Marie's small apartment and documents the turbulence both women experience—finding work, finding places to live, reconnecting with their families and with each other—on their different post-prison trajectories. Matheson said only one element of the play didn't ring true to her own experience in the past couple of months. In the opening scene, Lorraine (Christina Mastin) shows up at the apartment rented by Marie (Emily Chisholm). Beneath her studied calmness, Lorraine seems both excited and bewildered to be seeing her old cellmate and the rest of the world. Beneath Marie's studied calmness—it seems to be the mode one learns in prison—we sense a bit of panic, like a liar scrambling to keep her secrets.

In her experience, Matheson says, Lorraine would've left. She says prisoners learn to be deeply intuitive and sensitive to that kind of thing. "If they felt any resistance, they'd leave straight out. There's an unwritten code in prison that you don't go where you're not wanted, and to be independent."

But Lorraine needs—and expects—Marie to be a pal and help her for a few days. Lorraine has very little money, no real résumé, no recent rental history, and no real relationship with her adult son. (That, Matheson says, is painfully true to life. "The institution," she says, "provides no real reentry services. They do not.") Lorraine knows she needs a hand. Marie also needs a hand, but doesn't realize it quite so explicitly. We never learn exactly what she's doing for money, but she's clearly not working at the pub where she says she's employed.

Both Mastin and Chisholm give excellent performances as tough and intelligent (if not necessarily well-educated) women who had a deep friendship behind bars, but are tentative and scared of their post-prison lives, and a little scared of each other. Lorraine has maternal instincts but isn't sure how to proceed with her son or her former cellmate. Marie is bullheaded on the surface but wobbly on the inside, like she's not sure she even deserves to exist, much less to pursue happiness.

This, Matheson said, is also true to life: The prison system finds people at their weakest and most wounded, then stuffs them in a cage to stew for years on end, which is not exactly helpful. "There are definitely broken people in prison," she said. "And there are times when somebody should be removed from society—but not removed to sit around and do nothing. They need some healing, some rehabilitation, but our system is not about rehabilitation. It's punitive."

Other elements of This Wide Night that Matheson points out: How the women talk shit to each other as a form of affection. How much they enjoy horseplay. (Prisoners are not allowed much physical contact with anyone, Matheson said. Horseplay—normally forbidden and done in secret—is how they get to touch and communicate.) When Lorraine gets a letter from her son but can't bear to open it, she sets it on a table and stares at it. ("There's a lot of ambivalence about a letter," Matheson said. "People are incredibly excited to get it, but also concerned with what might be inside it. Especially mothers, some of whom were traumatically separated from their children.") And, most of all, how the women want to do right by themselves and each other, but seem a little lost about what "right" looks like in the outside world.

Didactic theater can be shrill and terrible, but This Wide Night, directed by Sheila Daniels, is a rare success in the genre. It quietly, cleverly, doggedly insists that ex-convicts are people, too. That sounds obvious. But sometimes people need to be reminded of what they already know.