The Wall Street Journal-20080125-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Review - Theater- Return of a Master- William Inge
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Review / Theater: Return of a Master, William Inge
COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA
Manhattan Theatre Club, Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St.
($46.50-$91.50), 212-239-6200/800-432-7250,
closes Mar. 16
ALMOST AN EVENING
Atlantic Theater Company, Atlantic Stage 2, 330 W. 16th St. ($45), 212-279-4200, closes Feb. 10
New York -- What happened to William Inge? Between 1950 and 1957 he racked up a stunning track record on Broadway -- four plays, four hits -- and all of his theatrical successes were turned into big-budget Hollywood movies with blue-chip casts. ("Bus Stop" starred Marilyn Monroe, while the Pulitzer-winning "Picnic" featured William Holden and Kim Novak.) For a time critics ranked him right behind Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. But Inge lost his sureness of touch as the buttoned-down '50s gave way to the unsettled '60s, and after a string of flops he fled to California to teach and drink, dying by his own hand in 1973. Unlike his more celebrated colleagues, he then vanished down the memory hole, and except for a pair of failed revivals of "Bus Stop" and "Picnic" in the mid-'90s, none of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1975. Thus it is very big news indeed that "Come Back, Little Sheba" has just been revived on Broadway for the first time since the original production opened there 57 years ago -- and that this deeply moving revival, which stars S. Epatha Merkerson of "Law & Order," is pitch-perfect from curtain to curtain.
A good staging can't save a bad play, but it can paper over the cracks in a creaky one, so I want to start off by saying that "Come Back, Little Sheba" is close to flawless. I'd never seen it on stage prior to this revival, and I had no idea what a wallop it packed. It is, like all of Inge's major plays, a tale of disappointment and frustration set against a shabby, penny-plain backdrop of ordinary middle-class life -- you might be watching an Edward Hopper painting come to life -- and much of its impact arises from the patience with which the author deals his thematic cards, waiting until just the right moment to throw down his hand and fill the stage with pain and sorrow.
In the first act we meet Doc (Kevin Anderson), an alcoholic chiropractor who has been sober for nearly a year, and Lola (Ms. Merkerson), his inexplicably child-like wife, who live in a rundown, ill-kept house that they share with a boarder, a flirty 19-year-old college girl (Zoe Kazan) who has an out-of-town fiance (Chad Hoeppner) and a local boyfriend on the side (Brian J. Smith). Though nothing much appears to be happening until just before intermission, Inge is stealthily telling us about his complicated characters all the while -- he leaves it to us, for instance, to figure out that Doc and Lola, who call one another "Daddy" and "Baby," are no longer sleeping together -- and a near-overwhelming sense of disquiet builds up as Lola goes about her chores, oblivious to the fact that her marriage is about to collapse under her feet.
You wouldn't guess from watching "Law & Order" that Ms. Merkerson is a stage actress of the first rank. She brings Lola's melancholy and yearning to life with such soft-spoken understatement that you feel as though you'd wandered through the back door of her house and sat down at her kitchen table for a chat. Ms. Kazan, who is making her Broadway debut after a pair of buzzworthy performances Off Broadway in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" and "Things We Want," is no less impressive -- she has a knack for blending innocence with sensuality to devastating effect -- and Mr. Anderson, though he looks a bit young to be playing Ms. Merkerson's husband, rises effortlessly to the challenge of the climactic scene in which he falls off the wagon and tells Lola all the things she doesn't want to know.
Michael Pressman, who is best known as a TV director, has staged "Come Back, Little Sheba" in a quiet, low-keyed manner that permits the action to unfold naturally and convincingly. James Noone's two- story set, lit with self-effacing skill by Jane Cox, is both impressively realistic (the kitchen table and chairs could have been bought at a yard sale) and discreetly poetic (the walls of the two bedrooms are cut away, letting us eavesdrop on the characters' inner lives). Peter Golub's incidental music strikes an appropriate note of tight-lipped rue.
Before I saw this production, I was inclined to accept the conventional wisdom that pegged William Inge as the junior partner in the white-shoe firm of Miller, Williams & Inge. Now I wonder whether he might not have been the best of the three, and I have no doubt that "Come Back, Little Sheba" is one of the finest American plays of the 20th century, a masterpiece of theatrical realism that merits close comparison to "The Glass Menagerie." The Manhattan Theatre Club has done a great thing by bringing it back to Broadway. Go and see what we've all been missing.
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I'm no fan of the Coen brothers, whose smirking nihilism has always left a nasty taste in my mouth. Still, you can't help but respect the sheer professionalism of films like "Fargo," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "No Country for Old Men," and so I was eager to see what "Almost an Evening," Ethan Coen's playwriting debut, might have to offer. The answer, as befits a nihilist, is nothing whatsoever. Despite the stalwart efforts of a high-grade cast whose members include F. Murray Abraham and Mark Linn-Baker, this triple bill of three short one-act plays about hell and its outskirts feels more like student work than a serious effort -- the first two plays are barely more than skits -- and I doubt it would have received a professional production had Mr. Coen used a pseudonym when pitching it. I'm not against on-the-job training, but this unfortunate undertaking is an embarrassment to all parties concerned.
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Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at [email protected].
