William Inge
Encyclopedia
William Motter Inge was an American
playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic
, earned him a Pulitzer Prize
. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest".
, Inge attended Independence Community College
and graduated from the University of Kansas
in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts
degree in Speech and Drama. Offered a scholarship to work on a Master of Arts
degree, he moved to Nashville
, Tennessee
, to attend the George Peabody College for Teachers
, but later dropped out.
Back in Kansas, he worked as a laborer on the state highway and a Wichita
news announcer. In 1937–38 he taught English and drama at Cherokee County Community High School in Columbus, Kansas
. After returning and completing his Master's at Peabody in 1938, he taught at Stephens College
, in Columbia
, Missouri
, from 1938 to 1943.
's encouragement, Inge wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), which was staged at Margo Jones
' Theatre '47 in Dallas, Texas
. While a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis
in 1946–1949, he wrote Come Back, Little Sheba
. It ran on Broadway
for 190 performances in 1950, winning Tony Award
s for Shirley Booth
and Sidney Blackmer
. (The 1952 film adaptation won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Shirley Booth. Willy van Hemert directed a 1955 adaptation for Dutch television, and NBC aired another TV production in 1977.) It was while teaching at Washington University that Inge's struggles with alcoholism became more acute and, in 1947, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. It was through AA that Inge met the wife of a member of his AA group whose name was Lola and, who through name as well as personal characteristics, was the individual upon whom one of the lead characters in Come Back, Little Sheba, "Lola," was based. Even as Come Back, Little Sheba was in a pre-Broadway run in early 1950, Inge was filled with some doubt as to its success, as he expressed in a letter to his sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, "If Sheba makes it in Hartford I guess it will go on to Broadway and if it doesn't I suppose I'll be back in St. Louis. If it does make it to Broadway, I don't know when I'll be back." Inge never had to return to St. Louis.
In 1953, Inge received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic
, a play based on women he had known as a small child:
Picnic had a successful Broadway run from 19 February 1953 to 10 April 1954. He followed with Bus Stop
(1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(1957), an expansion of his earlier one-act, Farther Off from Heaven. The inspiration for the play Bus Stop came from people Inge met in Tonganoxie, Kansas
. All three were adapted into major films. A major regional revival of Bus Stop is taking place at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in September and October 2010.
In 1953 his play Glory in the Flower was telecast on Omnibus
with a cast of Hume Cronyn
, Jessica Tandy
, and James Dean
. His 1959 play A Loss of Roses, with Carol Haney
, Warren Beatty
, and Betty Field
, was filmed as The Stripper (1963), with Joanne Woodward, Richard Beymer
and Claire Trevor, and a popular Jerry Goldsmith
score. In 1961, he won an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass
(Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen). John Frankenheimer
directed All Fall Down (1962), Inge's screenplay adaptation of the novel by James Leo Herlihy
. Inge was unhappy with changes made to his screenplay for Bus Riley's Back in Town
(1965), so at his insistence, the writing credit on the film is "Walter Gage".
Natural Affection had the misfortune to open on Broadway during the 1962 New York City newspaper strike
, which lasted from 8 December 1962 until 1 April 1963. Thus, few were aware of the play, and fewer bought tickets. It lasted only 36 performances, from 31 January 1963 to 2 March 1963. What theatergoers missed was a powerful drama on the theme of fragmented families and random violence. As with Truman Capote
's In Cold Blood
, the inspiration for Natural Affection came from a newspaper account of a seemingly meaningless and unmotivated murder. The play centers on a single mother, Chicago department-store buyer Sue Barker (Kim Stanley
). While troubled teen Donnie (Gregory Rozakis), Sue's illegitimate son, has been away at reform school, she has entered into a relationship with Cadillac salesman Bernie Slovenk (Harry Guardino
). With Donnie's unexpected return to her Chicago apartment, conflicts escalate, and Donnie finds himself on an emotional precipice. The closing five minutes of the play introduces a new character, a young woman Donnie meets in the apartment hallway. He invites her into the apartment and, without warning, kills her as the curtains close. The Broadway production, directed by Tony Richardson
, benefited from composer John Lewis's
made-to-order background music, which was provided via tape recordings, rather than live performance, and worked in the same fashion as a film score.
Inge's The Last Pad premiered in Phoenix, Arizona
in 1972. Originally titled The Disposal, the world premiere of The Last Pad was produced by Robert L. "Bob" Johnson and directed by Keith A. Anderson through the Southwest Ensemble Theatre. The production starred Nick Nolte
with Jim Matz and Richard Elmore (Elmer). The production moved to Los Angeles and opened just days after Inge committed suicide. The original production in Phoenix was proclaimed the Best Play of 1972 by the Arizona Republic, while the Los Angeles production brought awards to Nolte and helped introduce him to the film industry and catapult his subsequent film career.
The Last Pad is one of three of Inge's plays that either have openly
gay
characters or address homosexuality
directly. The Boy in the Basement, a one-act play written in the early 1950s, but not published until 1962, is his only play that addresses homosexuality overtly, while Archie in The Last Pad and Pinky in Where's Daddy? (1966) are gay characters. Inge himself was closeted.
Summer Brave
, produced posthumously on Broadway in 1975, is Inge's reworking of Picnic, as he noted:
About two dozen unperformed plays by Inge have begun receiving wider attention in 2009. They were available for viewing, but not copying or borrowing, in the collection of his papers at Independence Community College. One, a three-act play entitled Off the Main Road, was read at the Flea Theater in New York City on May 11, 2009, with Sigourney Weaver
, Jay O. Sanders
, and Frances Sternhagen
in the cast. Another, The Killing, a one-act play, directed by José Angel Santana, and starring Neal Huff
and J.J. Kandel, was performed at the 59E59 Theater, in New York City, through August 27, 2009. It is not yet known how many of these additional plays are complete. Besides Off the Main Road and The Killing, six others were performed in April 2009 at the William Inge Theater Festival, in Independence, Kansas. These six were published in A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge.
's Bus Stop
TV series, an adaptation of his play. With Marilyn Maxwell
as Grace Sherwood, the owner of Sherwood's Bus Station and Diner in a fictitious Colorado
town, the series presented dramas about the townspeople and travelers who passed through the diner in 25 hour-long episodes. The sixth episode, "Cherie", with Tuesday Weld
, Gary Lockwood
and Joseph Cotten
, was an abbreviated version of the original Bus Stop play. Robert Altman
directed eight episodes, and one of these, "A Lion Walks Among Us", led to a Congressional hearing on violence. The episode, which starred Fabian
as a maniacal axe-wielding serial killer, was adapted from Tom Wicker
's novel Told By an Idiot.
In 1963, Inge met with CBS to consider a one-hour filmed television drama about a family in a Midwestern town. The series, with six continuing characters, had the tentative title All Over Town, and was planned for the 1964–65 season. Instead, Inge did a play, Out on the Outskirts of Town, which was seen November 6, 1964, on NBC as part of the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre series. It starred Anne Bancroft
and Jack Warden
with Inge taking the role of the town doctor. NBC gave the play a repeat on June 25, 1965.
starring Anne Heywood as Evelyn Wyckoff. The film was released under several titles: The Shaming, The Sin, Secret Yearnings and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff.
My Son Is a Splendid Driver (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1971) is an autobiographical novel that traces the Hansen family from 1919 into the second half of the 20th Century. The novel received praise from Kirkus Reviews:
During the early 1970s, Inge lived in Los Angeles
, where he taught playwriting at the Irvine campus of the University of California. His last several plays attracted little notice or critical acclaim, and he fell into a deep depression, convinced he would never be able to write well again. He committed suicide by carbon monoxide
poisoning on June 10, 1973 at the age of 60.
Since 1982, Independence Community College's William Inge Center for the Arts in Inge's hometown of Independence, Kansas, has sponsored the annual William Inge Theatre Festival to honor playwrights. The William Inge Collection at Independence Community College is the most extensive collection on William Inge in existence, including 400 manuscripts, films, correspondence, theater programs and other items related to Inge's work.
Inge has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
.
There is also a black box theater
named for William Inge in Murphy Hall at the University of Kansas
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic
Picnic (play)
Picnic is a 1953 play by William Inge. The play premiered at the Music Box Theatre, Broadway on 19 February 1953 in a Theatre Guild production, directed by Joshua Logan, which ran for 477 performances....
, earned him a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was first awarded in 1918.From 1918 to 2006, the Drama Prize was unlike the majority of the other Pulitzer Prizes: during these years, the eligibility period for the drama prize ran from March 2 to March 1, to reflect the Broadway 'season' rather than the calendar year...
. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest".
Early years
Born in Independence, KansasIndependence, Kansas
Independence is a city in and the county seat of Montgomery County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 9,483.-Geography:...
, Inge attended Independence Community College
Independence Community College
Independence Community College is a community college in Independence, Kansas, United States. It is located between Tulsa, Kansas City, Wichita, Kansas and Joplin, Missouri and was formerly known as Independence Community Junior College....
and graduated from the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree in Speech and Drama. Offered a scholarship to work on a Master of Arts
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
degree, he moved to Nashville
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
, Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
, to attend the George Peabody College for Teachers
Peabody College
Peabody College of Education and Human Development was founded in 1875 when the University of Nashville, located in Nashville, Tennessee, split into two separate educational institutions...
, but later dropped out.
Back in Kansas, he worked as a laborer on the state highway and a Wichita
Wichita, Kansas
Wichita is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas.As of the 2010 census, the city population was 382,368. Located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita is the county seat of Sedgwick County and the principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area...
news announcer. In 1937–38 he taught English and drama at Cherokee County Community High School in Columbus, Kansas
Columbus, Kansas
Columbus is the second largest city and county seat of Cherokee County, Kansas, United States, 15 miles south-southwest of Pittsburg, Kansas. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,312.-History:...
. After returning and completing his Master's at Peabody in 1938, he taught at Stephens College
Stephens College
Stephens College is a women's college located in Columbia, Missouri. It is the second oldest female educational establishment that is still a women's college in the United States. It was founded on August 24, 1833 as the Columbia Female Academy. In 1856, David H. Hickman turned it into a college,...
, in Columbia
Columbia, Missouri
Columbia is the fifth-largest city in Missouri, and the largest city in Mid-Missouri. With a population of 108,500 as of the 2010 Census, it is the principal municipality of the Columbia Metropolitan Area, a region of 164,283 residents. The city serves as the county seat of Boone County and as the...
, Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, from 1938 to 1943.
Career
Inge began as a drama critic at the St. Louis Star-Times in 1943. With Tennessee WilliamsTennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
's encouragement, Inge wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), which was staged at Margo Jones
Margo Jones
Margo Jones was an influential American stage director and producer best known for launching the American regional theater movement and for introducing the theater-in-the-round concept in Dallas, Texas. In 1947, she established the first regional professional company when she opened Theatre ’47 in...
' Theatre '47 in Dallas, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
. While a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...
in 1946–1949, he wrote Come Back, Little Sheba
Come Back, Little Sheba (play)
Come Back, Little Sheba is a 1950 play by the American dramatist William Inge. The play was Inge's first, written while he was a teacher at Washington University in St...
. It ran on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
for 190 performances in 1950, winning Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...
s for Shirley Booth
Shirley Booth
Shirley Booth was an American actress.Primarily a theatre actress, Booth's Broadway career began in 1925. Her most significant success was as Lola Delaney, in the drama Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she received a Tony Award in 1950...
and Sidney Blackmer
Sidney Blackmer
Sidney Alderman Blackmer was an American actor.Blackmer was born and raised in Salisbury, North Carolina. He started off in an insurance and financial business but gave up on it. While working as a builder's laborer on a new building, he saw a Pearl White serial being filmed and immediately...
. (The 1952 film adaptation won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Shirley Booth. Willy van Hemert directed a 1955 adaptation for Dutch television, and NBC aired another TV production in 1977.) It was while teaching at Washington University that Inge's struggles with alcoholism became more acute and, in 1947, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. It was through AA that Inge met the wife of a member of his AA group whose name was Lola and, who through name as well as personal characteristics, was the individual upon whom one of the lead characters in Come Back, Little Sheba, "Lola," was based. Even as Come Back, Little Sheba was in a pre-Broadway run in early 1950, Inge was filled with some doubt as to its success, as he expressed in a letter to his sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, "If Sheba makes it in Hartford I guess it will go on to Broadway and if it doesn't I suppose I'll be back in St. Louis. If it does make it to Broadway, I don't know when I'll be back." Inge never had to return to St. Louis.
In 1953, Inge received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic
Picnic (play)
Picnic is a 1953 play by William Inge. The play premiered at the Music Box Theatre, Broadway on 19 February 1953 in a Theatre Guild production, directed by Joshua Logan, which ran for 477 performances....
, a play based on women he had known as a small child:
- When I was a boy in Kansas, my mother had a boarding house. There were three women school teachers living in the house. I was four years old, and they were nice to me. I liked them. I saw their attempts, and, even as a child, I sensed every woman’s failure. I began to sense the sorrow and the emptiness in their lives, and it touched me.
Picnic had a successful Broadway run from 19 February 1953 to 10 April 1954. He followed with Bus Stop
Bus Stop (play)
Bus Stop is a 1955 play by William Inge. The 1956 film is only loosely based upon it.-Characters:Bus Stop is a drama, with romantic and some comedic elements. It is set in a diner in rural Kansas, about 20 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri during a snowstorm from which bus passengers must take...
(1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is a 1957 play by William Inge about family conflicts during the early 1920s in a small Oklahoma town. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and was made into a film in 1960.-Plot:...
(1957), an expansion of his earlier one-act, Farther Off from Heaven. The inspiration for the play Bus Stop came from people Inge met in Tonganoxie, Kansas
Tonganoxie, Kansas
Tonganoxie is a city in Leavenworth County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 4,996.-Geography:Tonganoxie is located at...
. All three were adapted into major films. A major regional revival of Bus Stop is taking place at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in September and October 2010.
In 1953 his play Glory in the Flower was telecast on Omnibus
Omnibus (US TV series)
Omnibus is an American, commercially sponsored, educational television series.-History:Broadcast live primarily on Sunday afternoons at 4:00pm Eastern time, from November 9, 1952 until 1961. Omnibus originally aired on CBS, and later on Sunday evenings on ABC. The program finally moved to NBC in...
with a cast of Hume Cronyn
Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.-Early life:...
, Jessica Tandy
Jessica Tandy
Jessie Alice "Jessica" Tandy was an English-American stage and film actress.She first appeared on the London stage in 1926 at the age of 16, playing, among others, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V, and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. She also worked in British films...
, and James Dean
James Dean
James Byron Dean was an American film actor. He is a cultural icon, best embodied in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause , in which he starred as troubled Los Angeles teenager Jim Stark...
. His 1959 play A Loss of Roses, with Carol Haney
Carol Haney
Carol Haney was an American dancer and actress. After assisting Gene Kelly in choreographing films, Haney won a Tony Award for her role in The Pajama Game...
, Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has received a total of fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Director in 1982. He has also won four Golden Globe Awards including the Cecil B. DeMille Award.-Early life and...
, and Betty Field
Betty Field
Betty Field was an American film and stage actress. Through her father, she was a direct descendant of the Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla Mullins....
, was filmed as The Stripper (1963), with Joanne Woodward, Richard Beymer
Richard Beymer
George Richard Beymer, Jr. is an American actor known for playing Tony in the 1961 film version of West Side Story and Ben Horne on the 1990 television series Twin Peaks.-Life and career:...
and Claire Trevor, and a popular Jerry Goldsmith
Jerry Goldsmith
Jerrald King Goldsmith was an American composer and conductor most known for his work in film and television scoring....
score. In 1961, he won an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass
Splendor in the Grass
Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 romantic drama film that tells a story of sexual repression, love, heartbreak, and manic-depression, which the character Deanie suffers from...
(Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen). John Frankenheimer
John Frankenheimer
John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films...
directed All Fall Down (1962), Inge's screenplay adaptation of the novel by James Leo Herlihy
James Leo Herlihy
James Leo Herlihy was an American novelist, playwright and actor.Born into a working class family in Detroit, Michigan, Herlihy is known for his novels Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down and his play Blue Denim, all of which were adapted for cinema...
. Inge was unhappy with changes made to his screenplay for Bus Riley's Back in Town
Bus Riley's Back in Town
Bus Riley's Back in Town is a movie written by William Inge, directed by Harvey Hart, and starring Ann-Margret and Michael Parks.The intense drama depicts a man returning home from three years in the Navy only to find that his girlfriend has married an older man...
(1965), so at his insistence, the writing credit on the film is "Walter Gage".
Natural Affection had the misfortune to open on Broadway during the 1962 New York City newspaper strike
1962 New York City newspaper strike
The 1962-63 New York City Newspaper Strike ran from December 8, 1962 until March 31, 1963, lasting for a total of 114 days.-Preliminary actions:...
, which lasted from 8 December 1962 until 1 April 1963. Thus, few were aware of the play, and fewer bought tickets. It lasted only 36 performances, from 31 January 1963 to 2 March 1963. What theatergoers missed was a powerful drama on the theme of fragmented families and random violence. As with Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
's In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood (book)
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife and two of their four children. Two older daughters no longer lived at the farm and were not there at the time of the murders...
, the inspiration for Natural Affection came from a newspaper account of a seemingly meaningless and unmotivated murder. The play centers on a single mother, Chicago department-store buyer Sue Barker (Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances....
). While troubled teen Donnie (Gregory Rozakis), Sue's illegitimate son, has been away at reform school, she has entered into a relationship with Cadillac salesman Bernie Slovenk (Harry Guardino
Harry Guardino
Harry Guardino was an American actor whose career spanned from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. In 1964, he was cast in a short-lived CBS series entitled The Reporter, a drama about a hard-hitting investigative journalist named Danny Taylor. His principal co-star was Gary Merrill as city...
). With Donnie's unexpected return to her Chicago apartment, conflicts escalate, and Donnie finds himself on an emotional precipice. The closing five minutes of the play introduces a new character, a young woman Donnie meets in the apartment hallway. He invites her into the apartment and, without warning, kills her as the curtains close. The Broadway production, directed by Tony Richardson
Tony Richardson
Cecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer.-Early life:Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist...
, benefited from composer John Lewis's
John Lewis (pianist)
John Aaron Lewis was an American jazz pianist and composer best known as the musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet.- Early life:...
made-to-order background music, which was provided via tape recordings, rather than live performance, and worked in the same fashion as a film score.
Inge's The Last Pad premiered in Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
in 1972. Originally titled The Disposal, the world premiere of The Last Pad was produced by Robert L. "Bob" Johnson and directed by Keith A. Anderson through the Southwest Ensemble Theatre. The production starred Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte
Nicholas King "Nick" Nolte is an American actor whose career has spanned over five decades, peaking in the 1990s when his commercial success made him one of the most popular celebrities of that decade.-Early life:...
with Jim Matz and Richard Elmore (Elmer). The production moved to Los Angeles and opened just days after Inge committed suicide. The original production in Phoenix was proclaimed the Best Play of 1972 by the Arizona Republic, while the Los Angeles production brought awards to Nolte and helped introduce him to the film industry and catapult his subsequent film career.
The Last Pad is one of three of Inge's plays that either have openly
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
characters or address homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
directly. The Boy in the Basement, a one-act play written in the early 1950s, but not published until 1962, is his only play that addresses homosexuality overtly, while Archie in The Last Pad and Pinky in Where's Daddy? (1966) are gay characters. Inge himself was closeted.
Summer Brave
Summer Brave
Summer Brave is a play by William Inge, a revision of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1953 play Picnic. Set in a small town in Kansas in the early 1950s, it focuses on Hal Carter, an attractive young stranger who drifts into town just before the annual Labor Day celebration and sets off a chain of...
, produced posthumously on Broadway in 1975, is Inge's reworking of Picnic, as he noted:
- It wouldn't be fair to say that Summer Brave is the original version of Picnic. I have written before that I never completely fulfilled my original intentions in writing 'Picnic' before we went into production in 1953, and that I wrote what some considered a fortuitous ending in order to have a finished play to go into rehearsal. A couple of years after Picnic had closed on Broadway, after the film version had made its success, I got the early version out of my files and began to rework it, just for my own satisfaction. Summer Brave is the result. I admit that I prefer it to the version of the play that was produced, but I don't necessarily expect others to agree. Summer Brave might not have enjoyed any success on Broadway whatever, nor won any of the prizes that were bestowed upon Picnic. But I feel that it is more humorously true than Picnic, and it does fulfill my original intentions.
About two dozen unperformed plays by Inge have begun receiving wider attention in 2009. They were available for viewing, but not copying or borrowing, in the collection of his papers at Independence Community College. One, a three-act play entitled Off the Main Road, was read at the Flea Theater in New York City on May 11, 2009, with Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver is an American actress. She is best known for her critically acclaimed role of Ellen Ripley in the four Alien films: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, for which she has received worldwide recognition .Other notable roles include Dana...
, Jay O. Sanders
Jay O. Sanders
Jay Olcutt Sanders is an American character actor.Sanders was born in Austin, Texas, to Phyllis Rae and James Olcutt Sanders. He is noted for playing Mob lawyer character Steven Kordo in the 1986–88 NBC detective series Crime Story...
, and Frances Sternhagen
Frances Sternhagen
Frances Hussey Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.-Personal life:...
in the cast. Another, The Killing, a one-act play, directed by José Angel Santana, and starring Neal Huff
Neal Huff
Neal Huff is an American actor. He received his MFA from the Graduate Acting Program at New York University. He has appeared on Broadway in revivals of The Tempest and The Lion in Winter and the Tony Award-winning Take Me Out...
and J.J. Kandel, was performed at the 59E59 Theater, in New York City, through August 27, 2009. It is not yet known how many of these additional plays are complete. Besides Off the Main Road and The Killing, six others were performed in April 2009 at the William Inge Theater Festival, in Independence, Kansas. These six were published in A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge.
Television
During the 1961–62 television season, Inge was the script supervisor of ABCAmerican Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
's Bus Stop
Bus Stop (TV series)
Bus Stop is a 26-episode drama which aired on ABC from October 1, 1961, until March 25, 1962, starring Marilyn Maxwell as Grace Sherwood, the owner of a bus station and diner in the fictitious town of Sunrise in the Colorado Rockies...
TV series, an adaptation of his play. With Marilyn Maxwell
Marilyn Maxwell
Marilyn Maxwell , born Marvel Marilyn Maxwell, was an American actress and entertainer.Noted for her blonde hair and sexually alluring persona, she appeared in several films and radio programs, and entertained the troops during World War II and the Korean War on USO tours with Bob Hope.-Career:She...
as Grace Sherwood, the owner of Sherwood's Bus Station and Diner in a fictitious Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
town, the series presented dramas about the townspeople and travelers who passed through the diner in 25 hour-long episodes. The sixth episode, "Cherie", with Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld is an American actress.Weld began her acting career as a child, and progressed to more mature roles during the late 1950s. She won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960...
, Gary Lockwood
Gary Lockwood
Gary Lockwood is an American actor probably best known for his iconic 1968 role as the astronaut Dr. Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey.-Early life:...
and Joseph Cotten
Joseph Cotten
Joseph Cheshire Cotten was an American actor of stage and film. Cotten achieved prominence on Broadway, starring in the original productions of The Philadelphia Story and Sabrina Fair...
, was an abbreviated version of the original Bus Stop play. Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
directed eight episodes, and one of these, "A Lion Walks Among Us", led to a Congressional hearing on violence. The episode, which starred Fabian
Fabian (entertainer)
Fabiano Anthony Forte , known as Fabian, is an American teen idol of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He rose to national prominence after performing several times on American Bandstand. Eleven of his songs reached the Billboard Hot 100 listing.-Early life:Fabian was the son of Josephine and Domenic...
as a maniacal axe-wielding serial killer, was adapted from Tom Wicker
Tom Wicker
Thomas Grey "Tom" Wicker was an American journalist. He was best known as a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times.-Background and education:...
's novel Told By an Idiot.
In 1963, Inge met with CBS to consider a one-hour filmed television drama about a family in a Midwestern town. The series, with six continuing characters, had the tentative title All Over Town, and was planned for the 1964–65 season. Instead, Inge did a play, Out on the Outskirts of Town, which was seen November 6, 1964, on NBC as part of the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre series. It starred Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft was an American actress associated with the Method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg....
and Jack Warden
Jack Warden
Jack Warden was an American character actor.-Early life:Warden was born John Warden Lebzelter in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Laura M. and John Warden Lebzelter, who was an engineer and technician. He was of Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry...
with Inge taking the role of the town doctor. NBC gave the play a repeat on June 25, 1965.
Novels
Inge wrote two novels, both set in the fictional town of Freedom, Kansas. In Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1970), high-school Latin teacher Evelyn Wyckoff loses her job because she has an affair with the school's black janitor. The novel's themes include spinsterhood, racism, sexual tension and public humiliation during the late 1950s. Polly Platt wrote the screenplay for the 1979 film adaptationGood Luck, Miss Wyckoff
Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is a 1979 American drama film directed by Marvin J. Chomsky. The screenplay by Polly Platt is based on the 1970 novel of the same title by William Inge....
starring Anne Heywood as Evelyn Wyckoff. The film was released under several titles: The Shaming, The Sin, Secret Yearnings and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff.
My Son Is a Splendid Driver (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1971) is an autobiographical novel that traces the Hansen family from 1919 into the second half of the 20th Century. The novel received praise from Kirkus Reviews:
- Mr. Inge's novel, told in the form of a memoir, is a little more extended than Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and though there's a slackening of structure and splintering of content towards the second half, the first part is immaculate in both design and focus. It features the early years of Joey, the narrator here, and there are lovely scenes, as clear as the summer sunlight, with his family and on visits to assorted relatives. The time lag between Joey and his older brother Jule -- his mother's favorite, my son the splendid driver, and an attractive playboy of this midwestern world -- will never be reconciled. Even long after Jule's early death from a wanton incidental. Here Act I breaks away from Act II, a whole psychic anatomy of Joey's years as a young man in compressed and fractured incidents -- one replayed from Miss Wyckoff and one which seems unnecessary (his parents' syphilis). Thus Joey grows up impaired, never resolving his relationship with his absentee father or insufficiently loving mother, and ends up with his "aloneness like a corridor that has no end." Inge has told his story of life and death and all those spaces in between with a gentleness and probity which gives his novel a persistence few writers achieve.
During the early 1970s, Inge lived in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, where he taught playwriting at the Irvine campus of the University of California. His last several plays attracted little notice or critical acclaim, and he fell into a deep depression, convinced he would never be able to write well again. He committed suicide by carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide , also called carbonous oxide, is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas that is slightly lighter than air. It is highly toxic to humans and animals in higher quantities, although it is also produced in normal animal metabolism in low quantities, and is thought to have some normal...
poisoning on June 10, 1973 at the age of 60.
Since 1982, Independence Community College's William Inge Center for the Arts in Inge's hometown of Independence, Kansas, has sponsored the annual William Inge Theatre Festival to honor playwrights. The William Inge Collection at Independence Community College is the most extensive collection on William Inge in existence, including 400 manuscripts, films, correspondence, theater programs and other items related to Inge's work.
Inge has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
St. Louis Walk of Fame
The St. Louis Walk of Fame honors well-known people from St. Louis, Missouri, who made contributions to culture of the United States. All inductees were either born in the Greater St. Louis area or spent their formative or creative years there...
.
There is also a black box theater
Black box theater
The black box theater is a relatively recent innovation, consisting of a simple, somewhat unadorned performance space, usually a large square room with black walls and a flat floor.-History:...
named for William Inge in Murphy Hall at the University of Kansas
See also
- Sigma Nu LEADership learning program
Further reading
- Johnson, Jeff. William Inge and the Subversion of Gender: Rewriting Stereotypes in the Plays, Novels, and Screenplays. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2005.
- Voss, Ralph F. A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000. ISBN 978-0-7006-0442-5
Listen to
External links
- William Inge Center for the Arts, at Independence Community College, in Independence, Kansas.
- William Motter Inge Collection at Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, Kansas)
- St. Louis Walk of Fame