Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With apt and expressive detail, Inge has set his scene and animated it. Helped by extremely good acting, Director Elia Kazan has given the play a full-bodied, full-businessed stage life. A moment is tense, a scene is touching, the author obviously cares, the general effect is thoroughly his own. Yet the general effect has a somewhat ploppy, India-rubberlike impact. Playwright Inge's most definitive quality-his feeling for human lostness-becomes a little too insistent. It does not emerge from the characters; it tends, instead, to shape them. In the circumstances, the play's very...
...prescribe a method. One by one, each character is led up to the dark at the top of the stairs and revealed in his hair shirt. And each character's inner wound, however honestly representative, is dramatically a little commonplace. There is no enveloping mood to the play because there is recurrent parlor comedy and domestic vaudeville-things that instead of deepening the serious scenes emphasize them too much by contrast. Deeper chords never sound. The dark is there, truly enough; but it is much less terrifying, and even much less dark, from being so studiously spotlighted...
Shyly genial Bachelor Inge, 44, winces at his colleagues who write plays primarily "to shock, to teach, to preach at. I hate a play that tells me what to think. I have to let the audience make up its own mind about my characters...
...youngest of five children born to a traveling salesman, Inge grew up in Independence, Kans. grimly determined to become an actor, saw his dream dissolve in one frantic moment of stage fright three years after he graduated from the University of Kansas (class of 1935). "I played the choir master in an amateur production of Our Town," recalls Inge, "and suddenly I found I was terrified, too self-conscious to ever act again." Later, he spent an unhappy period as a high school and college teacher ("I experienced almost the same terrors as I did as an actor...
...three months he banged out Farther Off from Heaven, a play about a shoe salesman, had it produced by Margo Jones's Dallas Theater. Then he started to fiddle with an earlier short story of his about a black Scottie he had once been forced to sell. The story evolved into Come Back, Little Sheba (190 Broadway performances). "After that, they said...