New Play in Manhattan

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (by William Inge) takes the author, and the audience, back to the small-town world of his 1920s childhood. In a rambling old house it portrays a middle-class family; there is a slightly crude, life-speckled traveling salesman (Pat Hingle) who loves but forever collides with his gently exasperating wife (Teresa Wright). There is their unconfident, boy-frightened teen-age daughter; there is their small son, who can be hard and soft in the wrong places. Everybody, including the wife's sister (Eileen Heckart) and her dentist husband, is so outwardly recognizable, so comfortably life-sized and so frequently good for a laugh that, regardless of bank balances or growing pains or matrimonial bumps, things somehow look rather cozy.

But Playwright Inge has taken no simple sentimental journey; he has not so much traveled as tunneled back to the '20s. Despite the sister's gabby gossiping, the kids' shenanigans, the marital jawings and set-tos, the dress for the party and the dressing for the party, there are bogeys at the stairhead and phantoms outside the window. There are everywhere fears, self-doubts, deep-hidden voids; something gnaws at the chatterbox sister, drills against the dentist's heart, suddenly blows up in an adolescent Jew.

With apt and expressive detail, Inge has set his scene and animated it. Helped by extremely good acting, Director Elia Kazan has given the play a full-bodied, full-businessed stage life. A moment is tense, a scene is touching, the author obviously cares, the general effect is thoroughly his own. Yet the general effect has a somewhat ploppy, India-rubberlike impact. Playwright Inge's most definitive quality--his feeling for human lostness--becomes a little too insistent. It does not emerge from the characters; it tends, instead, to shape them. In the circumstances, the play's very title becomes too overt.

Yet all this does not so much precipitate a mood as prescribe a method. One by one, each character is led up to the dark at the top of the stairs and revealed in his hair shirt. And each character's inner wound, however honestly representative, is dramatically a little commonplace. There is no enveloping mood to the play because there is recurrent parlor comedy and domestic vaudeville--things that instead of deepening the serious scenes emphasize them too much by contrast. Deeper chords never sound. The dark is there, truly enough; but it is much less terrifying, and even much less dark, from being so studiously spotlighted.

"I never start writing with any 'theme' in mind," says Playwright Inge (rhymes with hinge). "I find my themes only as the characters and the situation develop."

As he poked into the lives of "characters that are dimly autobiographical," Inge came upon the theme of "fear, the personal fear with which each man lives in a world that does not want to recognize fear. It has taken me many years of living to realize the fears in us all, the fears in the most seemingly brave, the bravery in the most seemingly frightened."

When newspaper critics greeted The Dark with cheers last week and daylong lines began forming at the box office, Inge could chalk up a topflight commercial and critical record on Broadway. His previous hits: Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), with Shirley Booth; Picnic (1953), a Pulitzer Prizewinner; and Bus Stop (1955), with Kim Stanley. Hollywood bought all three. Inge's total take: close to a million dollars.

Shyly genial Bachelor Inge, 44, winces at his colleagues who write plays primarily "to shock, to teach, to preach at. I hate a play that tells me what to think. I have to let the audience make up its own mind about my characters."

The youngest of five children born to a traveling salesman, Inge grew up in Independence, Kans. grimly determined to become an actor, saw his dream dissolve in one frantic moment of stage fright three years after he graduated from the University of Kansas (class of 1935). "I played the choir master in an amateur production of Our Town," recalls Inge, "and suddenly I found I was terrified, too self-conscious to ever act again." Later, he spent an unhappy period as a high school and college teacher ("I experienced almost the same terrors as I did as an actor"). He was turning out drama reviews for the St. Louis Star-Times when Tennessee Williams came to town in 1944. Inge interviewed Williams about playwriting, later went up to Chicago to see his The Glass Menagerie. Says Inge: "It was a momentous experience for me. I went back to St. Louis thinking, 'I've got to write a play.' "

In three months he banged out Farther Off from Heaven, a play about a shoe salesman, had it produced by Margo Jones's Dallas Theater. Then he started to fiddle with an earlier short story of his about a black Scottie he had once been forced to sell. The story evolved into Come Back, Little Sheba (190 Broadway performances). "After that, they said I was in."

Like his earlier plays, The Dark echoes twih Inge's boyhood days: "I seem to return to the Midwest not only because I know it, but because I find the regional speech more lyrical and familiar. My mother, who was part Scot, part Irish, had lovely, melodic speech. I find myself going back to the melody of her voice and to others I remember. I've lived in New York for eight years, but so far, I've been afraid tackle the speech patterns of the city."

Even before The Dark at the Top of the Stairs hit Broadway, Warner Bros. bought the movie rights, hired Inge to do the screenplay. "In the past, I did not feel ready to tackle Hollywood," says Inge. "But I feel now that I have some mastery my craft." Another upcoming Inge project: his first novel, a story of a boy growing up in the Midwest.

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