"Remembering William Inge" by Bryan Colley

from the April, 2010 issue of KC Stage

Born in Independence, Kansas, William Inge attended the Independence Community College, where the annual William Inge Festival celebrating his legacy has been held every year since 1982. This year’s festival runs April 21-24 and will feature guest playwright Paula Vogel, the author of How I Learned to Drive and, most recently, A Civil War Christmas. The Inge Festival follows the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s staging of Bus Stop, which closes April 3, and Martin Tanner Production’s staged reading of Touched: The Last 2,000 Heartbeats of William Inge by Marcia Cebulska on March 28.

Inge is generally famous for four plays — Picnic, Bus Stop, Come Back, Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs — each of which were turned into Hollywood films. Bus Stop earned him the Pulitzer Prize, and a revival directed by David Cromer is scheduled to open on Broadway this fall. Inge also won an Academy Award for the screenplay to Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass.

While these plays are performed consistently around the country, a considerable amount of Inge’s work is largely unknown. Inge has written more than 25 plays and some work for television. He also wrote two novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and My Son is a Spendid Driver, both set in the fictional town of Freedom, Kansas. Many of his plays have barely seen the light of day since his death, when his writings were cloistered away at the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kansas as part of his estate — available for viewing but unpublished and unproduced.

Only in the last year have these lost plays received some exposure. In New York City, The Killing was produced at the 59E59 Theatre and Off the Main Road received a staged reading at the Flea Theatre with Frances Sternhagen and Sigourney Weaver. Five more plays were premiered at the 2009 Inge Festival and were published as A Complex Evening by On Stage Press, a division of Samuel French. Copies are only available through the Inge Center. Inge Center associate Bruce Peterson wrote in an e-mail that, “the plays were selected partly because they represented writing styles different from what one thinks of for Inge.” He added that, “there remain a couple dozen or so unpublished one-acts of various lengths in the collection. There is interest from major publishing houses to get The Killing and other of his scripts published, though it is not expected in the near future.”

Inge’s Life
Inge graduated from the University of Kansas in 1935 and later taught at Stephens College in Columbia. He moved to St. Louis in 1943 to serve as a drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, where he wrote his first play. Once hailed as the American Chekhov or the next Tennessee Williams (who was a close friend), Inge was a writer whose fame rose and fell during his lifetime, and he committed suicide at the age of 60 after a string of critical and commercial failures left him a clinically depressed alcoholic.

Williams offered this remembrance in his book New Selected Essays: Where I Live: "I met Bill Inge in December, 1944, when I returned home briefly to St. Louis. At that time, he was writing for the Star-Times, doing dramatic criticism and interviews and, I think, also serving as music critic.

“This was during the Chicago break-in of The Glass Menagerie and Bill came to our suburban home to interview me.  He was embarrassingly ‘impressed’ by my burgeoning career as a playwright. It’s always lonely at home now: my friends have all dispersed. I mentioned this to Bill and he cordially invited me to his apartment near the river. We had a gala night among his friends. Later we attended the St. Louis Symphony together. He made my homecoming an exceptional pleasure.

“When I returned to Menagerie in Chicago, Bill shortly arrived to attend and cover the play, and I believe he was sincerely overwhelmed by the play and the fabulous Laurette Taylor, giving her last and greatest performance.

“A year or two later, I was back in St. Louis and we met again. He had now retired as a journalist and was teaching English at Washington University, not far from our home, and was living in the sort of neo-Victorian white frame house that must have reminded him of his native Kansas. There, one evening, he shyly produced a play that he had written, Come Back, Little Sheba. He read it to me in his beautifully quiet and expressive voice: I was deeply moved by the play and I immediately wired Audrey Wood about it and urged him to submit it to her. She was equally impressed and Bill became her client almost at once.

“It was during the rehearsals of that play… that Bill had his first nervous crisis. The tension was too much for him, he assuaged it copiously with liquor. Paul Bigelow took him in charge and had him hospitalized away from Broadway’s traumas, and I don’t think Bill even attended his opening night.”

Inge entered psychoanalysis after Sheba opened on Broadway. It was a modest success, but Inge wrote that “there was absolutely no one to understand how I felt, for I didn’t feel anything at all. I was in a funk. Where was the joy I had always imagined? Where were the gloating satisfactions I had always anticipated? I looked everywhere to find them. None were there.”  He added, “My plays since Sheba have been more successful, but none of them has brought me the kind of joy, the hilarity, I had craved as a boy, as a young man, living in Kansas and Missouri back in the thirties and forties. Strange and ironic. Once we find the fruits of success, the taste is nothing like what we had anticipated.”

Inge’s Work
Inge’s plays are primarily known for their study of loneliness and repressed sexuality, a subject which resonated more in the inhibited 1950s than in subsequent decades. Critics have been dismissive of Inge’s work as overly sentimental, although today it’s generally thought that Inge was highly critical of life in small town middle America filled with compromise and sexual repression.

Inge’s fascination with sexual repression was borne in part by his closeted homosexuality, and several critics have since reinterpreted his works from this point of view. His later plays Where’s Daddy?, The Boy in the Basement, and The Tiny Closet featured blatantly homosexual characters, and the one-acts written near his death serve as some of his most personal and confessional work. Missouri Repertory Theatre founder Patricia McIlrath once wrote that Inge, “knew small town life perfectly, its agonies and its ecstasies; he knew, possibly personally, the agony of assuming moral responsibility for one’s own acts, a strong trait and virtue of the Middle West.”

Inge took his critics seriously and suffered emotionally when his plays weren’t embraced. He once wrote in the foreword of a collection of his four major plays that “the playwright comes to realize, maybe with considerable shock, that the play contains something very vital to him, something of the very essence of his own life. If it is rejected, he can only feel that he is rejected, too. Some part of him has been turned down, cast aside, even laugh at or scorned. If it is accepted, all that becomes him to feel is a deep gratefulness, like a man barely escaping a fatal accident, that he has survived.”

In the preface to Natural Affection he added that “it’s impossible for a writer to defend his own work. He may try to explain it, but he may not succeed. If a work of his is contested, or disputed, or badly criticized, all about all a writer can say is, ‘I’m sorry. It’s what I felt like writing at a certain time in my life, and I was in hopes people would find meaning in it.’ My new play, Natural Affection, has been contested, praised, disputed, and criticized. In many cases, the violence of the criticisms has surpassed the violence of the play. But the play has also won enough esteem to convince me that its writing was not a waste of time.”