Come Back, Little ’50s, Even With the Clouds
By BEN BRANTLEY
THIS spring at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center a young, radiant and unmistakably American woman will proclaim proudly in song that she is “as normal as blueberry pie.” And when audiences listen to Kelli O’Hara deliver this assertion as Nellie Forbush in the musical “South Pacific,” they will most likely believe, at least for that moment, that all-American normalcy is a wonderful state of being.

That was presumably the feeling in April 1949, when Nellie first trilled from a Broadway stage the joys of being corn fed, healthy and hopeful. Embodied by Mary Martin, the spunky sweetheart of the American musical, Nellie seemed like an emblem for the decade to come in the United States, a nation stretching its muscles and feeling its oats after emerging victorious and newly powerful from World War II.

Which happens to be the era on which Broadway is lavishing much of its attention this season, with revivals of at least three major plays from the 1950s, two new musicals inspired by movies set in the 1950s and, as a bright centerpiece, the first full-scale Broadway revival of “South Pacific” since it ended its long maiden run on Jan. 16, 1954.

But theatergoers who crave heaping helpings of comfort food from the days when voters liked Ike and father knew best are likely to go away hungry. If the first of these productions to arrive — the Manhattan Theater Club’s loving but clear-eyed revival of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” which opened last month — is any indication, the 1950s will be recalled less as a land of sunshine than one of shadows. Even Nellie Forbush, in case you’ve forgotten, was forced to acknowledge that cockeyed optimism can lead to blindness.

It’s rare that the New York theater demonstrates the kind of thematic convergence that it’s showing in the second half of its 2007-8 season. Trends on Broadway in recent years have tended to spring from purely (some might say cynically) commercial motives. Shows inspired by popular movies; musicals assembled from Top 40 songbooks; plays starring actors with little stage experience but lots of exposure via tabloids and television: these fads are all rooted in the belief that brand-name familiarity reduces the daunting risk factor of producing on Broadway.

Yet now Broadway is delivering the square center of the 20th century: a decade that has not, to my knowledge, been identified in marketing surveys as one that audiences are dying to shell out big bucks to relive. And not only is Broadway offering a full slate of 1950s-style offerings, it is also, unusually, in sync with the trends in clothing that have been walking the runways in recent weeks. What gives?

On the surface there is an obvious answer. When life gets messy — as it definitely seems to be in a country shadowed by explosive foreign entanglements and a possible recession — people long for tidiness. And the mainstream dramas of the 1950s are, for the most part, as neatly tailored and unassuming as a cloth coat worn by Pat Nixon, the vice presidential wife for most of that decade.

There is something reassuring about the visibility of the dramaturgical seams in this impeccable production of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” starring the excellent S. Epatha Merkerson. This low-key portrait of a middle-class Midwestern marriage lets you know that it was written according to strict and orthodox rules as to what a play should be.

As the introduction to a published version of a later Inge work, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” has it, attending one of his plays is “like going next door to call on a well-liked neighbor.” But audiences are in for a surprise: “William Inge the playwright, like William Inge the gentleman from Kansas via St. Louis, uses his good manners for their proper dramatic purpose, which is to clothe a reality that is far from the surface.”

Those words, by the way, were written by Tennessee Williams, the dominant American playwright of that era, whose “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), his biggest commercial hit during his lifetime, opens next month in a revival starring Terrence Howard and James Earl Jones.

Williams’s affectionate appraisal of Inge elicits another trait common to the dramas of the 1950s, including his own: a strong sense that mendacity — to use the watchword of “Cat” — begins at home, among families that seem pretty and happy only from a distance. In a decade of unprecedented prosperity, when television shows like “Leave It to Beaver” portrayed housewives happily vacuuming in pearls and starched skirts, Broadway and the grittier, smaller Hollywood movies of the middle of the decade were probing the raw spots among those who failed to measure up to the gleaming ideals of domesticity.

This examination process was jumpstarted by the two great American dramas of the early postwar years, both from the late 1940s: Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” two very different but equally harsh portraits of shattered illusions.

I don’t think of Miller and Williams as “1950s playwrights”; their work is too big to be confined to period-piece pigeonholes. But they set the tone for many of the studies in disenchantment by lesser, more sentimental writers who followed, including Inge (school of Williams) and Paddy Chayefsky (school of Miller). The latter’s television dramas and screenplays about blue-collar folks under strain included “Marty” and “TheCatered Affair,” which has been adapted by Harvey Fierstein and John Bucchino as a musical starring Faith Prince and Mr. Fierstein, opening on Broadway in April.

“A Catered Affair,” set in the Bronx in 1953, measures the toll taken by a working-class couple’s disagreement over whether to give their daughter a fancy wedding they can’t afford. “Little Sheba,” “Cat” and Clifford Odets’s backstage drama “The Country Girl” (also opening in April in a production directed by Mike Nichols and starring Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher) are all centered on men who turn to drink to numb the sting of failure. They all also consider, to sometimes subversive effect, the traditional balance of power within families, particularly between husbands and wives.

Perhaps when the outside world seems unbearable and uncontrollable, it’s natural to refocus on life at home, where problems, if exposed, might at least have a chance of being solved. Certainly a taste for vintage domestic drama has already surfaced with the popular “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s super-size dysfunctional-family soaper, which, as a friend of mine put it, gives you “five William Inge plots for the price of one.” And the new Off Broadway musical “Next to Normal,” which opened this month, sets the tribulations of a fractured American family to a power-ballad beat.

As for theatergoers for whom a return to the fraught home fronts of the ’50s feels like putting on a straitjacket, there’s always “Cry-Baby,” an adaptation of John Waters’s 1990 movie about how the rock ’n’ roll spirit rips apart staid old Baltimore in 1954. Think of it as a signal of the sexual revolution to come, which Broadway will also pay tribute to this season with the revival of Marc Camoletti’s “Boeing-Boeing,” a French farce about a triple-timing swinger (who juggles affairs among three stewardesses) from the early 1960s. And the Public Theater has promised to restage this summer its fleetingly seen revival (from last summer) of the decidedly uninhibited tribal-love-rock musical “Hair,” first produced seven years and a cultural millennium after the 1950s ended.