William Inge (1913 –1973) was barely keeping his life together in the mid-1940s. He came out of a struggling lower-middle class family in Kansas, much like the Floods in this play—absent father, over-protective mother, shy, retiring sister (although there were other siblings in Inge’s real family), extremely sensitive younger son. From his childhood, Inge had been obsessed with the theatre. An artsy kid who excelled in public recitation, he would say in later years that the public performances of his youth allowed him to be part of the community around him, gave him “a means of dealing with life . . . enabling me to function.” A closeted homosexual in the morally conventional Midwestern society of the 1920s and ‘30s, Inge grew up with the abiding sense of being a lonely outsider. He studied speech and drama in college and toured with a traveling troupe, but then turned to teaching as a practical alternative to acting during the Great Depression. His crisis came during graduate study when he developed such painful self-consciousness and insecurity that he no longer had “the guts to stand in front of an audience.”

When Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) met him in 1945, Inge had clawed his way back from ten years of misdirection, insecurity, and emotional breakdowns. He had dropped out of masters studies to work on a Kansas road crew. He had returned to complete his MA, and begun to teach dramatics in a college. He had worked intermittently as a radio announcer. He also had hit the bottle heavily.

In 1943 Inge became the drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Tribune, and began to write, both theatre essays and reviews and short fiction. In 1945 drama critic William Inge interviewed playwright Tennessee Williams, who was fresh from the Broadway triumph of The Glass Menagerie (1945). Williams befriended and encouraged Inge. It may be, as some speculate, that they were lovers for a time, but it is certain that they were friends and that Williams consciously mentored the younger man as a playwright. Seeing the Chicago production of Glass Menagerie in Williams’ company was a turning point in Inge’s life. He clearly recognized in Glass Menagerie the mirror of his own upbringing and the potential for transforming that raw material into theatre. Inspired, he wrote his first play, a one-act memory play called Farther Off from Heaven that Williams persuaded his friend Margo Jones to produce in Dallas in 1947.

Ten years later, riding on the successes of Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1956), Inge reworked and expanded Farther Off from Heaven into The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which had a very successful Broadway run and won a Tony for Best Play of the year. The play still bears the marks of inspiration from Glass Menagerie and Inge dedicated the play to Tennessee Williams.

And yet Dark isn’t just a memory play, but a mature expression of Inge’s consistent themes of isolation and loneliness, the revelation of dread and fear in all human existence, and the slender but comforting hope of sympathy between people when illusions are destroyed. One feels in all Inge’s work that his own consciousness of darkness and isolation was never far away. To deal with this foreboding, Inge wrote brilliant dialogue and drank heavily. If his work was less than a complete success or if he was cruelly criticized, he cracked. At the end of his life, the darkness claimed him and he committed suicide.

This is a play that exposes that darkness of soul that all the characters try to deny and keep at bay. At the center of this play is a child, very like William Inge as a boy, earning his first money by reciting a soliloquy debating suicide. Innocently, 10- year old Sonny declaims the old chestnut, “To be or not to be/That is the question . . . .” an issue that one of the most appealing characters will decide in the negative.

To be. Is it worth it?

Everyone is afraid of the dark. Cora Flood, scared that her husband is unfaithful to her and angry at his frequent absences, idealizes her sister’s marriage, hovers too protectively over her children, and baits her husband into violence. Rubin Flood, hides his terror that he is losing his livelihood and security in a world changing too fast for him. Teenaged sister Reenie, shy and withdrawn, is too frightened of social attention to care for others’ feelings. Sonny, overly sensitive and attached to his mother, is full of longing for the illusory world of Hollywood, keeping a scrapbook of movie stars and using every ruse to go to the pictures as often as he can.

Events force them to be more honest. Cora’s sister Lottie, with her lusty demeanor, reveals the emptiness of her enviable marriage. Rubin loses his job and speaks honestly to his wife, possibly for the first time. And the handsome, gracious Sammy Goldenbaum, carrying a whiff of Hollywood fantasy about his attractive person, will reveal how neglectful and inhuman that movieland world can be. Poor Sammy, kind to everyone, tender with children, is more a fragile isolate than any of the family characters, who ultimately discover a certain resilience in their interdependence.

That’s the ambivalent thing about darkness. It certainly can be feared as the terrifying nothingness waiting to swallow us up. But the darkness can also simply be the shadow that sets into relief the true light of ordinary reality. It holds the mystery of the erotic renewal in the husband waiting to make love to his wife, or the loving bounds between siblings who go off to sit together in a darkened movie house. When false hope is gone, the characters turn to one another in sympathy and in dawning appreciation of what is real.

© 2009 by Eileen Warburton

For further reading:
Richard M. Leeson, ed., William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport. Ct: Greenwood, 1994).
Ralph F. Voss, A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph (Lawrence: U/Press of Kansas, rprt. 1990).


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.