The Laureate of Longing

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA by William Inge

When Come Back, Little Sheba opened on Broadway in 1950, critics hailed its author, William Inge, as an authentic voice of the plain people west of the Mississippi. He burnished his reputation for passionate simplicity with Picnic (winner of a 1953 Pulitzer Prize), Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). Never a master of plot or construction, Inge was incomparably tender, a poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-aged longing. An honored place in theater history seemed assured. Then all went sour. Flop followed flop; drink and depression overtook him. When he committed suicide in 1973, the New York Times obituary appraised him as a man who had "lost his gift."

Gift there was, however, and after near oblivion, Inge is being rediscovered: last week the Roundabout Theater in New York City mounted a powerful Come Back, Little Sheba, the first major Manhattan production since its premiere. The Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., is currently staging A Loss of Roses with Elizabeth Franz and Shaun Cassidy. A musical version of Bus Stop and a West Coast stage revival of Picnic are pending, and Washington Post Drama Critic David Richards is writing an Inge biography.

Like all of Inge's best plays, Sheba is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere. An alcoholic chiropractor (Philip Bosco) and his slatternly wife (Shirley Knight) live in a dreary house in the Midwest, diverted from maudlin introspection only by their boarder, a sprightly college student (Mia Dillon). Doom seeps through every dusty curtain. Although the husband is supposedly recovered, it is apparent that he is looking for an excuse to take a drink. Although the college girl is beloved as a surrogate for the couple's baby daughter who died 20 years before, it is evident that she will, however inadvertently, add to the wreckage of the marriage. The title refers to the wife's calling for a lost puppy, yet it is clear that hers is in truth a cri de coeur for the unassuageable pain of growing old before she has even grown up. If this is the heartland, it is as seen by Freud: the husband lusts after the girl and fantasizes about her as the virtuous virgin that his wife was not; the wife acts kittenish even with the milkman; the girl selects lovers, then discards them. Middle age is portrayed as a time of aching sexual frustration, made more acute by the close-at-hand vision of youth. Some of Inge's kitchen-sink exposition seems dated and clumsy in its mix of naturalism and artifice. But Sheba remains a showcase for poignant acting. Knight attains a lumpish sweetness but does not sentimentalize her character as a victim. Bosco has little to do until his whisky-sodden storming, but radiates the disappointment that beclouds the house. Dillon blends coy charm with unhesitating selfishness.

And as her beau of convenience, Kevin Conroy is boisterously funny yet pathetic, reveling in his self-image as "a brute," never realizing that it is he who is being overpowered. Inge did not transform his characters: they end where they began. But he understood them. In their interplay was genuine life, often blunted but ever resilient. --By William A. Henry III