The successful playwright, whose dramatic scope is never outwardly wide, whose characters are as commonplace as old shoes, and whose subject matter rarely rises above the ordinary routine of small-town life, necessarily must possess compensating gifts. William Motter Inge … has an abundance of such gifts. Possessed of extraordinary perception, sensitivity, and compassion, he has the rare and admirable trait of expressing the frustrations and dilemmas of "the so-called little man without being patronizing and without the sentimentalist's knack of killing him with a dubious sort of kindness, à la Saroyan." His dramatic aim, as expressed in a series of midwestern and southwestern community plays, is modest but almost invariably true. As the creator of a large number of well-realized, though ordinary men, women, and children, Inge has portrayed the fortunes and misfortunes of their domestic lives with integrity and sympathy…. [Beginning with Come Back, Little Sheba] his career has revealed Inge as "the modest poet of the American landscape of failure and near failure." Although limited in range and depth of technique and style, Inge's stagecraft has captivated both stage and motion picture audiences by its familiar realism. (pp. 211-12)

[Come Back, Little Sheba] is honest Americana. As a bare, almost clinical characterization of a middle-aged and intellectually mismated couple, the play exhibits a young play-wright's genuine concern for hapless people, beset by secret frustrations and dreams of a better life—for small-town natives who, transplanted to a small midwestern city, live lives "of quiet desperation," knowing in themselves that their narrow world will not improve, yet clinging to hope. (p. 212)

[Come Back, Little Sheba] obviously was the creation of a talented playwright. Nevertheless, it was a bit bare and restricted. Just three years later Inge broke through into a much wider world with a new play titled Picnic: A Summer Romance, a moving drama about a young drifter and a new group of Kansas townsfolk who, during a brief summer association, learn a lot of simple yet profound things about each other. (p. 213)

Criticism has been made of Inge's sacrifice of sensitivity and pathos for the sake of calculated effects. Sometimes the comedy lines seem contrived; and, as Mr. Kerr felt, "characters pose, prance, pause, and writhe with alarming mathematical efficiency." Also, is the language of the play poetic enough for the wistful ambitions of the characters? Nevertheless, in Picnic Inge achieved a rueful sense of comedy in his authentic portrayal of the upsetting of the even tenor of small-town routine by the arrival of a vital and semicollegiate drifter. The "tragical-comical" excitement which broke out in the neighborhood provides a fluid drama flowing with provincial life—humorous, casual, honest….

[Inge's comedy,] Bus Stop, offers events, characters, and personal revelations of greater variety than those to be found in Picnic. The play's levels of interest are more diverse also, ranging from farce to pathos, from normal conduct to poignant abnormality. A Broadway hit, it was "lusty and sad, extravagant and sober, ordinary and extraordinary, deceptively banal in situation and curiously original in treatment." (p. 215)

[The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a] perceptive and tender portrayal of ordinary humanity, is a study in contrarieties, with contrasting approaches to the central force of fear and disillusionment. Inge … noted the play's symbolism: "The dark at the top of the stairs may represent any number of things to any number of people. To me it represented a fear of the future." Remembering his own childish dread about how he would meet life when he grew up, Inge tried to bring back into this play the very personal values which a group of Oklahoma townsfolk sifted from their own existence and cherished against odds. In short, his conviction that man, in the midst of modern confusion and frightening change, needs faith in personal value is a significant part of the corpus of the play. (pp. 216-17)

A penetrating drama of small-town ways, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs offers a searing and fascinating examination of family love and strife in the oil-boom country of Oklahoma in the early 1920's. Inge observingly presents the violence and the domestic tirades, the humor and the tenderness and the tears in [a] small-town home…. (p. 217)

Regardless of its several flaws, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is a moving, perceptive, and striking drama of the impact of the changing times of the twenties upon south-western townspeople, as well as upon the town itself. (p. 218)

[In A Loss of Roses] Inge gives attention to the bad effects of the depression on the community in general, in large measure the plot primarily offers a psychological study of Mrs. Baird, a tired-looking nurse in her middle forties who no longer strives to make herself sexually attractive, and her restless son Kenny…. (p. 219)

Unlike so many small-town plays, A Loss of Roses offers no dramatization of class or race struggles. Rather, as Inge himself has explained, "It deals with individuals who, like people today seeking an inner peace in the midst of terrifying change, must come to deal with evil in their lives, either to be destroyed or to find themselves strengthened."…

In the words of his friend Tennessee Williams, Inge in his small-town plays has "uncovered a world within a world,… a secret world that exists behind the screen of neighborly decorum … [the world beneath] the genial surface of common American life." (p. 220)