Desperate Housewife.('Come Back, Little Sheba')(Theater review)

William Inge was sixty years old when he committed suicide, in Los Angeles, on June 10, 1973. For the first half of his life, Inge, who was born in Independence, Kansas, had stayed true to his Bible Belt roots and put off becoming an artist. After graduating from the University of Kansas and completing a teaching degree, he had taught at Stephens College for Women, in Columbia, Missouri, for five years. Then, in 1943, in what must have been a nerve-racking leap of faith for the timid, alcoholic, and largely closeted gay man, he applied for and got a job as a drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times. At the paper, Inge was sometimes required to write features. One such assignment led to his meeting--and eventually perhaps sleeping with--a young writer named Tennessee Williams. Inge saw Williams's 1944 play, "The Glass Menagerie," in Chicago, and it had a profound effect on his ambitions. Williams recalled:

Bill came up one week end to see the play. . . . After the show, we walked back to my hotel in the Loop of Chicago, and on the way he suddenly confided to me, with characteristic simplicity and directness, that being a successful playwright was what he most wanted in the world for himself.

Thanks, in part, to Williams, Inge's first play, "Farther Off from Heaven" (1947), was produced, in Dallas, but it didn't make the jump to New York. (Inge later reworked the play, turning it into the elegiac drama "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," which had an enormously successful Broadway run in 1957.) But it was his second play, "Come Back, Little Sheba" (now in revival by the Manhattan Theatre Club, at the Biltmore), that gave Inge his first real crack at stardom. By the time "Come Back, Little Sheba" opened on Broadway, in 1950, Inge had found his style. "I have never sought to write plays that primarily tell a story; nor have I sought deliberately to create new forms," he noted in the introduction to his 1958 collection, "Four Plays." "I have been most concerned with dramatizing something of the dynamism I myself find in human motivations and behavior. I regard a play as a composition rather than a story, as a distillation of life rather than a narration of it. . . . I doubt if my plays 'pay off' for an audience unless they are watched rather closely." Although little actually happens in "Come Back, Little Sheba," the sound of the seismic plates of feeling and manipulation shifting beneath the drama's flat surface is shattering--if you listen.

Lola (the remarkable S. Epatha Merkerson), a former beauty queen and current negligent housewife, certainly wants you to listen--at least, to her. Whenever she opens the front door of her rather shabby Midwestern home, Lola says a lot, even when she has nothing to say. And who can blame her? She has so few people to talk to. Oh, sure, there's her husband, Doc (the solid Kevin Anderson), and their boarder, a college student named Marie (Zoe Kazan). Still, whoever turns up at the door gets an earful. At the start of the play, Lola offers the postman (Lyle Kanouse) a cool drink of water. This is not a kindness on her part. It is done to insure that he will remain a captive audience to her endless speeches:

My husband, he's a doctor, a chiropractor; he has to stay inside his office all day long. The only exercise he gets is rubbin' people's backbones. . . . You know what? My husband is an Alcoholics Anonymous. He doesn't care if I tell you that 'cause he's proud of it. He hasn't touched a drop in almost a year. All that time we've had a quart of whiskey in the pantry for company and he hasn't even gone near it. Doesn't even want to. You know, alcoholics can't drink like ordinary people; they're allergic to it. It affects them different. . . . Sometimes they get mean and violent and wanta fight. . . . You should have seen Doc before he gave it up. He lost all his patients, wouldn't even go to the office; just wanted to stay drunk all day long and he'd come home at night and-- You ...