">William
Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed
plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These
plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but
languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge
heroine.
One of them, “The Killing,” is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59
Theaters in Manhattan. This story about a man so terrified of committing suicide
that he asks another man to kill him has parallels to Inge’s life. He killed
himself in 1973 after struggling for years with depression and alcoholism.
Pain permeates most of Inge’s work. His major plays, “Come Back, Little
Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” portray
rural Americans struggling with sexual repression (he was gay), alcoholism,
small-town gossip and religiosity.
These issues haunted Inge most of his adult life, said Peter Ellenstein,
artistic director of the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kan.,
Inge’s hometown. Inge, who won the Pulitzer
Prize for “Picnic” in 1953 and an Academy Award for writing the 1961 film
“Splendor in the Grass,” sought approval from townsfolk who often scorned him
for being a homosexual.
“The Killing,” which runs through Aug. 27, is the second rediscovered Inge
play to receive its world premiere in New York this year. The Flea Theater in
SoHo staged a reading of the three-act “Off the Main Road” on May 11 with Sigourney
Weaver, Jay O. Sanders and Frances
Sternhagen. The Flea is considering staging a full production of it or
another unperformed play by Inge this fall.
These two works are among about 25 — an exact count is still being
determined, since some of the plays may be incomplete — stored in the library at
Independence Community College, which houses a collection of Inge’s writings, as
well as artwork he collected. The plays have been available for researchers to
read on site but, in order to preserve them, were not to be copied or checked
out of the library. It was a case of manuscripts hiding in plain sight.
“There’s often a disconnect between the caretakers of a collection and the
arts organizations that might want them,” said Marcel LaFlamme, curator of the
collection and the college’s library director. “Curators have been trained to
put the preservation of the artifact first, but within the last 20 years there’s
been more of a focus on access, mostly because of digitization.”
Beyond Inge’s hometown few knew these plays existed. Many of the works,
including “The Killing,” were written after his naturalistic style of
characterization became passé.
“Inge has been called the American Chekhov because on the surface you have
mundane conversation about the smallness of people’s lives, but the characters
go very deep,” Mr. Ellenstein said. “I think for many years in the flash and
bang of new types of theater and sparkling dialogue, the richness and the fabric
of his writing got lost.”
Mr. Ellenstein and his colleagues at the center decided last year to petition
the Inge estate to allow these plays to be disseminated. With approval from
Inge’s heirs, they approached International Creative Management, the literary
agency that represents Inge’s estate, about doing an anthology. This
collaboration led to a more elaborate idea.
“I was so thrilled about this, but I thought many of these, especially the
one-acts, might be ignored in a catalog,” said Buddy Thomas, an agent at ICM. “I
thought we should get them out there to theaters because we’ve always felt that
he doesn’t get the modern attention that Tennessee
Williams and Arthur
Miller get.”
The William Inge Theater Festival in Independence, a four-day celebration of
his works held annually since 1982, staged six of the plays in April and
published them in the anthology “A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William
Inge.” Mr. Ellenstein said the works ranged from Pinteresque minimalism to a
comedy “that could have been written by Christopher
Durang.” After Inge’s last Broadway play, “Where’s Daddy?,” flopped in 1966,
he turned to different forms of writing, experimenting with the one-act, then in
vogue, Mr. Ellenstein said.
At the Summer Shorts festival “The Killing” joins one-acts by contemporary
playwrights, including Neil
LaBute and Carole Real. In Inge’s play two men enter an apartment with
unclear motives; then one begs to be killed.
While working on the play the director, José Angel Santana, said he found an
unanticipated connection. “One of the big influences after I decided to direct
it was the death of Michael Jackson, a man who was truly lonely and who needed
relief from that,” Mr. Santana said, adding that this made the play more timely
for him. “The pain of isolation is so great that he asks for relief.”
That pain feels biographical: “The Killing” depicts a possible gay sexual
encounter and a plea for death from a character too afraid to kill himself.
Independence, Kan., has not always celebrated Inge, one of its own, Mr.
LaFlamme said. But as times have changed, so has his local legacy and
popularity.
“There was resistance in the community at one time even to archive his
works,” Mr. La-Flamme said. “Gay and closeted was a dark secret once upon a
time. The town now seems to feel like, ‘This is our native son, even if he was
different.’ ”