Until the appearance of A Loss of Roses (1959), Inge had a reputation as a playwright whose work did not fail. Following the modest success of Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Inge's next three plays, Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), established him as one of Broadway's most successful playwrights; because of our strange belief in the corollary relationship between income and reputation, Inge also came to be accepted as one of America's leading dramatists. His own ambiguous sense of his position is made clear in the Foreword to 4 Plays in which he dwells on his longing for both big success ("but none of them has brought me the kind of joy, the hilarity, I had craved as a boy") and artistic success, a feeling of having contributed something to the theater.

If the self-image that Inge projects in that Foreword—the playwright who went into analysis after the first hint of success with Sheba—tags him as a representative American (intellectual, artistic variation) of the fifties, it is not surprising that his plays should embody the theatrical commonplaces of the decade. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is almost a casebook of clichés for our time…. The basic pattern in [the play] is to confront the child with a situation that must push him or her toward maturity. (p. 41)

The articulate self-awareness that Inge and most of his contemporaries give to their characters disposes of the virtue of revelation through dramatic action, through the conflict of personality, through the interaction of one man's life on another…. Speeches, such as those of Lottie's [in Dark], are hardly Chekhovian revelation; they are much more like the show-and-tell period at the neighborhood kindergarten. Behind Lottie's self-definition and those of Sammy in Dark, Hal and Rosemary in Picnic, Dr. Lyman in Bus Stop, and Doc and Lola in Sheba … lies the remnants of a first-year course in psychology or an incompletely digested analysis. At least, Inge, in his psychologizing, avoids the kind of jargon that some of his fellow playwrights use. (pp. 42-3)

Although Inge's characters spend a good part of their time explaining their motivations (in Picnic, for instance, although one good scene between the two sisters would make everything clear, Millie must indicate frequently that she resents Madge's beauty and Madge must have a speech in which she complains that beauty is not enough), they still have to go through the regular expositional hoops to give the audience the past out of which the dramatic present has grown…. The clumsiest exposition in the early Inge plays comes in Bus Stop in which Elma Duckworth, another of the adolescent yearners, wanders from character to character, gathering information as though she were a researcher for Current Biography. The logical end product of Inge's tendency toward explanation is A Loss of Roses, in which practically nothing happens except in the narrated past.

One of the recurring criticisms of American drama in the last fifteen years is that in it action has given way to talk. There is a kind of validity in that position, but since good talk in the theater is often a kind of action, the difficulty lies not in the fact of but the quality of the talk. The naturalistic tradition seems to have spawned a host of dull people who are bromidic and repetitive, inarticulate except at those moments of high whine when they grind out their tales of woe; Inge's plays have their quota of such characters…. I could throw a handful of paper clips out of the window … and hit a half-dozen ordinary people who have more life, more vitality, more originality, and more serious problems than the lonely, longing people who infest the Inge plays. My disapproval is too blanket, of course. There are characters in the early Inge plays, particularly Lola in Sheba, who are strong enough, in their pathos or comedy, to insist that their ties to life are stronger than their ties to soap opera. Inge, who has an ear for Midwestern speech, apparently built Lola consciously out of the clichés of common usage, but they are only the vehicle of her expression; she transcends them … because Inge can allow himself a certain comic indulgence that would be impossible with Doc, whose pretensions really demand a satirist…. Rosemary, in Picnic, has some of Lola's virtues as a character; although she is solidly based on the stereotype of the old-maid schoolteacher, Inge's conception of her as comic allows him more easily to bring the submerged pathos into the open, makes her more touching than the romanticized Hal and Madge. There is a kind of tough funniness about Cherie and a certain charm about the bumptiousness of Bo in Bus Stop that makes that out-and-out comic couple more theatrically palatable than many of Inge's other characters.

By The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, in which everyone is something and no one is, the casebook had triumphed over characterization. (pp. 43-5)

Of all the clichés that keep Dark afloat, the most blatant is the ending, when, having got the children off to the movies, Cora mounts the stairs to join Rubin who stands (we just see his feet) where the dark once lurked, waiting to take her to bed. In one sense, this is the ending to all of the plays…. Broadway's prevailing belief that love conquers all … is as fatuous a solution to dramatic problems as an age is likely to come up with. Bus Stop is after all a romantic comedy, so it is proper that Cherie and Bo exit together for a Montana ranch where, according to the conventions of the theater, they will live happily ever after. Unhappily, Inge, like so many of his fellow playwrights, has transferred the romantic-comedy ending to all of his plays. He has done so diffidently, as though he were unsure that the evidence at the box office really proved the validity of the sentimental fade-out. In the original version of Picnic, Madge did not follow Hal, and in Sheba, still his best play, the joining of Doc and Lola at the end is more of a truce than an embrace. Even so, the prevailing message of the plays is that love is a solution to all social, economic, and psychological problems.

The final scene of Dark is not only an example of the love-panacea ending, it is representative of a popular variation within the general type—the sex-as-salvation conclusion. The dramatic purpose of Lottie's detailed analysis of her marriage, in so far as it has any, is that it convinces Cora that she is happy with Rubin. Although Inge takes the trouble to indicate that the couple have radically different ideas about social and personal goals, although the father and his children have lost any ability to communicate with one another, and although the family is faced with a genuine economic crisis, the suggestion is that sexual compatibility will carry the day. This kind of phallic romanticism is also evident in Picnic in which Hal … suggests that his future is likely to be rosier than his past after one night of love with Madge…. (pp. 46-7)

There is, also, still dark at the top of the stairs. Inge's titular metaphor for every man's fear of the uncertain future is indicative of an intrusive symbolism that he had not used since Sheba. In that play, the missing dog, so insistently equated with Lola's lost youth, stands out incongruously in a simple naturalistic play that has no need of it. There is the same kind of obviousness in the symbolic use of Turk's javelin and the excessive explicitness of Lola's dreams. It may well have been The Glass Menagerie … that caused him to sprinkle Sheba with symbols that do not grow out of the drama, but are grafted onto it. In any case, such devices are not evident in Picnic and Bus Stop. With Dark, Inge reverted to his earlier practice. (pp. 47-8)

By trying to reach Inge's work through The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which for me is one of his least attractive plays, I have perhaps been unfair to the playwright. He has (or had in the early plays) a genuine talent for small, touching effects; this is a real theatrical virtue. Still, Dark is a play that received both critical and popular approbation, and it is certainly typical of his work…. In his Foreword to 4 Plays, Inge wrote: "I deal with surfaces in my plays, and let whatever depths there are in my material emerge unexpectedly so that they bring something of the suddenness and shock which accompany the discovery of truths in actuality." He might well have stopped at the end of the first clause. (pp. 48-9)