Word: shebas
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COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA by William Inge...
When Come Back, Little Sheba opened on Broadway in 1950, critics hailed its author, William Inge, as an authentic voice of the plain people west of the Mississippi. He burnished his reputation for passionate simplicity with Picnic (winner of a 1953 Pulitzer Prize), Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). Never a master of plot or construction, Inge was incomparably tender, a poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-aged longing. An honored place in theater history seemed assured. Then all went sour. Flop followed flop; drink and depression overtook him. When he committed...
Gift there was, however, and after near oblivion, Inge is being rediscovered: last week the Roundabout Theater in New York City mounted a powerful Come Back, Little Sheba, the first major Manhattan production since its premiere. The Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., is currently staging A Loss of Roses with Elizabeth Franz and Shaun Cassidy. A musical version of Bus Stop and a West Coast stage revival of Picnic are pending, and Washington Post Drama Critic David Richards is writing an Inge biography...
Like all of Inge's best plays, Sheba is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere. An alcoholic chiropractor (Philip Bosco) and his slatternly wife (Shirley Knight) live in a dreary house in the Midwest, diverted from maudlin introspection only by their boarder, a sprightly college student (Mia Dillon). Doom seeps through every dusty curtain. Although the husband is supposedly recovered, it is apparent that he is looking for an excuse to take a drink. Although the college girl is beloved as a surrogate for the couple's baby daughter who died 20 years before, it is evident...
...waited a lifetime, more than 30 years, to hear those three words, 'Mrs. Howard Hughes.' " And the three words were worth perhaps eight figures to Terry Moore, 54, actress (Peyton Place, Come Back Little Sheba) and Korean War pinup girl. Back when she was a starlet in 1949, Moore maintains, she and Billionaire Hughes, then 43, were secretly married on a sailing trip to Mexico and were never legally divorced, even though he remarried at least once and she has since married and divorced three other men. After Hughes' death in 1976, Moore went public with...