don’t ever leave me. If you do, they’d have to keep me down at that place [the drunk tank] all the time.” Doc and Lola are back together, not for very positive reasons, but rather because neither has any real alternative.

The characterization and the timing in this play are superb; the control is sure and steady. The business of the play is well taken care of early in the action as Lola, a lonely woman unhappy with herself and with what she has become, talks compulsively to anyone who will listen—the milkman, the postman, the next-door neighbor, and Mrs. Coffman, who in contrast to Lola is neat, clean, and well-organized, as a woman with seven children needs to be. Lola tells the audience all they need to know about her history while convincing them of her loneliness by reaching out desperately to anyone who comes into her purview. The resolution for Lola comes in the last act, when she begins to clean up the house, pay attention to her appearance, and write a note for the milkman rather than lurk to engage him in conversation.

Lola’s dream sequences, which hold up quite well psychologically, are skillfully used to handle more of the necessary business of the play. The final dream has to do with Turk and the javelin, which Turk has already described as “a big, long lance. You hold it like this, erect.” In Lola’s dream, Turk is disqualified in the javelin throwing contest and Doc picks up the javelin “real careful, like it was awful heavy. But you threw it, Daddy, clear, clear, up into the sky. And it never came down.” Inge’s exposure to Freudian psychoanalysis certainly pervades the dream sequences.

Inge does not give the audience an upbeat or hopeful ending in Come Back, Little Sheba; rather, he presents life as it is. Perhaps Lola has matured a little. Perhaps both she and Doc have gained some insights that will help them to accept their lives with a bit more resignation than they might otherwise have, but nothing drastic is likely to happen for either of them. They will live on, wretchedly dependent on each other. If their marriage lasts, as it probably will, the mortar that holds it together will be dependence more than love. At least Lola has faced reality sufficiently to say, “I don’t think Little Sheba’s ever coming back, Doc,” and to stop searching for her.

Picnic

Inge’s second Broadway success, Picnic, started as a fragmentary play, “Front Porch,” that Inge wrote shortly after Farther Off from Heaven. The original play consisted of little more than character sketches of five women in a small Kansas town. The play grew into Picnic, a much more fully developed play, and finally into Summer Brave, which is little different from Picnic except in the resolution of the Madge-Hal conflict.

Four of the five women in Picnic live in one house. They are Flo Owens; her two daughters, Millie, a sixteen-year-old tomboy, and Madge, the prettiest girl in town; and their boarder, Rosemary Sydney, a schoolteacher in her thirties. Madge is engaged to marry Alan Seymour. Their next-door neighbor is sixty-year-old Helen Potts, who also participates in the action of the play. These women are all sexually frustrated; although Madge and Rosemary both have suitors, the relationships are specifically delineated as nonsexual.

Into this tense setting is introduced an incredibly handsome male animal, Hal Carter, who exudes sexuality. As insecure as he is handsome, Hal is down on his luck and has arrived in town looking for his friend Alan Seymour, who might be able to give him a job. Hungry, he exchanges some work in Helen Potts’s yard for a meal. He works bare-chested, much to the consternation of the women, whose upbringing decrees that they feign shock at this display but whose natural impulses are in conflict with their conservative upbringing.

Hal, reminiscent of Turk in Come Back, Little Sheba, causes chaos, as might be expected. The play focuses on the women, and Hal serves as the catalyst. Inge’s ability to draw convincing characters, particularly female characters, is particularly evident in Picnic. He maintains his clear focus on the women in the play, using Hal precisely as he needs to in order to reveal these women as the psychologically complex beings they are. Never does the focus slip; never does the control over material and characters waver.

As the action develops toward a climax in the second act, Hal’s physical presence more than anything else pushes the conflict to its dramatically necessary outcome. Millie and Rosemary start drinking from Hal’s liquor bottle after Hal turns his attention from Millie to her more mature sister. Both Millie and Rosemary are soon drunk. Flo vents her own frustrations by upbraiding the two of them, but not before Rosemary, humiliated that Hal is not available to her and distressed that she finds him so attractive, shrieks at him that he came from the gutter and that he will return to the gutter. This emotional scene heightens Hal’s insecurity, which is necessary if the play is to proceed convincingly to a love affair between Hal and Madge, an outcome that seems inevitable.

The screaming fit also forces Rosemary to face reality and to realize that her erstwhile suitor, Howard, is probably her only realistic out if she is not to continue teaching and if she is not to become frustrated and grow old alone. She goes off with Howard and yields to him, after which she asks, then begs him to marry her. In the play’s final version, he will go only so far as to say that he will come back in the morning but when he does, Rosemary has already spread the news that she and Howard are going to marry, so that when Howard arrives, everyone congratulates him, and he has no choice but to leave with Rosemary, presumably to marry her. Inge is intrigued by the theme of forced marriage, which recurs in nearly all his major plays, and Picnic offers a striking variation on the theme.

Back at the picnic, Alan and Hal have engaged in fisticuffs and Alan has reported Hal to the police, forcing him to leave town in order to avoid arrest. In Summer Brave, Hal leaves and Madge stays behind; at the urging of Joshua Logan, Inge changed the ending of the play, so that in Picnic, Madge packs her suitcase and follows Hal a short time after his forced departure.

Bus Stop

Bus Stop, despite its popular acceptance, does not have the stature of Come Back, Little Sheba or Picnic. An expanded version of Inge’s one-act People in the Wind, Bus Stop is set in a small crossroads restaurant between Kansas City and Wichita, where the passengers on a bus are stranded because of a blizzard. Among the passengers is Bo Decker, a twenty-one-year-old cowpoke from Montana who is traveling with Virgil Blessing, a middle-aged father surrogate (suggestive of Pinky in Where’s Daddy?), and with a brainless little singer, Cherie, whom he met in a Kansas City nightclub, where she was performing. Bo was pure until he met Cherie, but now, in a comical role-reversal, he has lost his virginity to her and is insisting that she return to Montana with him to make him an honest man. Cherie joins Bo and Virgil, and they are on their way west when the bus is forced by the weather to pull off the road.

Cherie has second thoughts about going to Montana, and after thinking the matter over, she accuses Bo of abducting her and the police become involved in the situation. Bo has a fight with the sheriff. He is humiliated and apologizes to everyone in the restaurant, including Cherie. Before the play is over, however, Bo asks Cherie to marry him, she agrees, and they set out for Montana, leaving Virgil Blessing behind and alone.

The development of Bus Stop is thin, and the characterization, particularly of Bo, is not close to the high level reached in Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic. Although Bo is similar in many ways to Turk and Hal, he is made of cardboard and lacks the multidimensional elements that make Turk and Hal convincing.

The play is stronger in the presentation of its minor characters, particularly the lonely, frustrated Grace, a middle-aged woman who lives at the small crossroads where the bus has stopped and who works the night shift in the restaurant. She has sex with a truck driver not because she loves him but because he keeps her from being lonely. In the end, she and Virgil Blessing are left alone in the restaurant. The bus has pulled out, and one might think that Grace and Virgil are the answer to each other’s loneliness, but Inge does not provide a double resolution in this play. He permits Bo and Cherie to leave on a somewhat optimistic note, much as he allowed Hal and Madge a future in Picnic, but he wisely backs off from providing the pat resolution that a romance between Grace and Virgil would have provided, because the psychological motivation for such a relationship has not been built sufficiently throughout the play.

The original play, People in the Wind, contained two characters who were not included in Bus Stop. They are two older women, apparently both unmarried and seemingly sisters, who are going to visit their niece. It appears that they want the niece to take them in in their old age, but they are not sure she will do so. They are nervous, drinking bicarbonate of soda to calm their stomachs. They represent the fate that can befall people who do not form close family ties early in their lives. In dropping them from Bus Stop, Inge was clearly opting to make the focus of the later play love rather than loneliness, which was the central focus of People in the Wind.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the finished version of Farther Off from Heaven, is Inge’s most autobiographical play. In it, the author returns to a plot centering on a family, and this time, it is clearly Inge’s own family that he is writing about. Rubin Flood is a harness salesman who travels a great deal, leaving his children, Sonny and Reenie, in a mother-dominated home. The setting is a small town in Oklahoma.

Inge, who had been in psychoanalysis for several years when he wrote The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, paid particular attention to the Oedipal elements of the mother-son relationship in this play and in two subsequent plays, A Loss of Roses and Natural Affection, although not with the success that he achieved in this earlier presentation.

Rubin Flood and his wife, Cora, were married early, propelled into marriage by Rubin’s unmanageable libido. The marriage has encountered difficulties, which come to a head when Rubin, having lost his job—a fact he keeps from his wife—discovers that Cora has bought Reenie an expensive dress for a dance given at the country club by the nouveau riche Ralstons. He demands that the dress be returned for a refund, and a heated argument ensues, during which Cora taunts Rubin to strike her. He obliges and then leaves, vowing never to return. In act 2, Cora’s sister, Lottie, and her dentist husband, Morris, have arrived for a visit. Cora hopes that she will be able to persuade Lottie to take her and the children in now that Rubin has abandoned them. In this scene, also, Reenie’s blind date for the dance, Sammy Goldenbaum, arrives. A cadet at a nearby military academy, Sammy is meticulously polite and none too secure. His exquisite manners charm Lottie and Morris before he and the pathologically shy Reenie depart for the dance. Once at the dance, Reenie introduces Sammy to the hostess, who is drunk, and Reenie leaves the dance, not telling Sammy she is going. He tries to find her but cannot.

In act 3, Reenie’s friend Flirt appears with the news that Sammy took the train to Oklahoma City, rented a hotel room, and killed himself, presumably because the drunken Mrs. Ralston, on discovering that Sammy was Jewish, had asked him to leave the party. Sammy’s suicide forces the principal characters to reconsider their lives, and the play ends somewhat on the upbeat. Rubin has returned home. He is tamed, as is evidenced by the fact that he confesses to Cora, “I’m scared. I don’t know how I’ll make out. I . . . I’m scared,” and that he leaves his boots outside, not wanting to dirty up Cora’s clean house.

Sonny Flood, who has been an obnoxious child throughout the play, apparently has turned the corner by the end of it. He volunteers to take his distraught sister to the movies, and when his mother tries to kiss him goodbye, he declines to kiss her, giving the audience an indication that his Oedipal tendencies are now coming under control.

Inge tried to do something daring in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and although he failed, it was a creditable attempt. He juggled two significant conflicts, the Rubin-Cora conflict and the Sammy-society conflict. As the play developed, the conflict involving the suicide was not sufficiently prepared for to be wholly believable. Inge’s admitted purpose was to use the suicide subplot to divert the attention of the audience from the conflict between Rubin and Cora, so that they could return to this conflict in the last act with a fresher view.

The suicide subplot has been severely attacked by critics. It is, however, a serious misinterpretation to view the suicide as an event that the author intended to present realistically. It can succeed only as a symbol, serving the useful function of promoting the resolution of the main conflict. This is not to justify the suicide subplot, which is a weakness in the play, but rather to demonstrate the artistic purposes Inge envisioned for it.

Later Plays

None of Inge’s later plays achieved the standard of his four Broadway successes. Some of his most interesting work is found in his one-act plays, fourteen of which are available in print. Had Inge lived longer, probably some of the materials in these plays would have lent themselves to further development as full-length dramas; particularly notable are To Bobolink, for Her Spirit, The Tiny Closet, and The Boy in the Basement.