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James F's Reviews > Four Plays: Come Back, Little Sheba / Picnic / Bus Stop / The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
Four Plays: Come Back, Little Sheba / Picnic / Bus Stop / The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
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Although American playwright William Inge wrote plays right up to his suicide in 1973, he is best known for these four plays from the 1950's. They are very typical of that decade, dealing with bored housewives, their bored children, respectability, dysfunctional families, and in short all the things which caused a reaction to the other extreme in the sixties. All four are set in the rural Midwest.
Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) is about a bored wife and her alcoholic husband, who take in a young woman boarder; the two lovers of the young woman are a rather crude athlete and a rich college student, a pairing which returns in the second play, Picnic (1953). In that play, we have two widows living next door to one another, one with her aged mother and one with two daughters, who also takes in a spinster schoolteacher as a boarder; an athletic "vagabond" shows up to do some yardwork for one of the widows, and we have a triangle involving him, the older daughter, and her rich college student boyfriend.
Bus Stop (1955), best known because of the Marilyn Monroe movie, takes place at a bus stop in Kansas during a blizzard, where the stranded passengers (two cowboys, a nightclub singer, the waitresses, the bus driver and an alcoholic ex-professor) interact; Inge is trying to portray various forms of "love" here, but again one cannot really imagine things happening quite this way after the fifties (or at all, but that's another question.)
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) is set in the 1920's rather than the 1950's, but apart from the transition from horses to automobiles, the feeling is still 50-ish, although perhaps the two periods were pretty similar outside the major cities. It is about a traveling salesman and his wife and two children, a dysfunctional family. There is a "happy ending" but it is not really credible and is too late in any case.
I enjoyed all four; Inge is a good playwright, but no Arthur Miller.
Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) is about a bored wife and her alcoholic husband, who take in a young woman boarder; the two lovers of the young woman are a rather crude athlete and a rich college student, a pairing which returns in the second play, Picnic (1953). In that play, we have two widows living next door to one another, one with her aged mother and one with two daughters, who also takes in a spinster schoolteacher as a boarder; an athletic "vagabond" shows up to do some yardwork for one of the widows, and we have a triangle involving him, the older daughter, and her rich college student boyfriend.
Bus Stop (1955), best known because of the Marilyn Monroe movie, takes place at a bus stop in Kansas during a blizzard, where the stranded passengers (two cowboys, a nightclub singer, the waitresses, the bus driver and an alcoholic ex-professor) interact; Inge is trying to portray various forms of "love" here, but again one cannot really imagine things happening quite this way after the fifties (or at all, but that's another question.)
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) is set in the 1920's rather than the 1950's, but apart from the transition from horses to automobiles, the feeling is still 50-ish, although perhaps the two periods were pretty similar outside the major cities. It is about a traveling salesman and his wife and two children, a dysfunctional family. There is a "happy ending" but it is not really credible and is too late in any case.
I enjoyed all four; Inge is a good playwright, but no Arthur Miller.
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July 22, 2024
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July 22, 2024
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