On Inge

by RICK DANLEY // January 14, 2019

Once upon a time — let’s call it the early 1950s — three colossi of the American theater overshadowed all the other playwrights in the land. Award-winning scripts tumbled from their desks and were picked up by Broadway and performed for packed houses and praised to the skies by the critics.

Each writer, in his own way, labored to dramatize the unspoken desires and anxieties that vibrate beneath the polite veneer of the American middle-class family. And for years these men ate Pulitzer Prizes like candy: Tennessee Williams for “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1948; Arthur Miller for “Death of a Salesman” the next year; and William Inge for his play “Picnic” four years after that.

Who, in 2019, hasn’t heard of “Streetcar” or “The Glass Menagerie” or “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”? And who can’t find in the disappointed salesman Willy Loman her own story of neglected dreams and untended ambition? And what high schooler hasn’t been assigned Miller’s costume allegory, “The Crucible”?

Every day, on some lighted stage, in some far-flung part of the world, the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are benefiting from the oxygen of a fresh staging.

But what of that third colossus — Kansas-born, alcoholic, gay, depressive, winner of an Academy Award, a writer with a perfect ear for small-town speech, who was able to see through the various masks we all don in an attempt to conceal our insecurities, but who had a heart generous enough to know that, even despite our best efforts, we are all failed creatures who deserve in most cases not the bony finger of judgement, but, instead, the sympathetic light of understanding.

In other words, what ever happened to William Inge?

ON THURSDAY, the Iola Public Library hosted two courteous guides from the land of Inge: Bruce Peterson, the managing director of the William Inge Center for the Arts, in Independence — the late playwright’s hometown — and Sarah Owen, the curator of the Inge Collection at Independence Community College.

In attendance were a dozen local residents, an important portion of whom belonged to the Intrepid Readers Book Discussion, an Iola-based book club with model taste in literature. The group’s January book selection was Inge’s “Four Plays,” a collection of the playwright’s best-known work: “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop,” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”

If you missed Thursday’s event, however, here are some possible consolations:

— You could join the Intrepid Readers Book Discussion. Recent selections have included “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders and “Stiff” by Mary Roach. February’s book will be Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and on March 7 the group will discuss Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Call the library for more information about joining: 620-365-3262.

— You can stay abreast of the many programs the library hosts each month by visiting the Iola Public Library Facebook page.

— Finally, you can make plans to attend the 38th Annual William Inge Theatre Festival, which runs May 22-25, in Independence. With the shuttering of the superlative Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola and until Cherryvale erects a similar living monument to its own Louise Brooks, the Inge Festival is the only chance to publicly remember one of the brightest stars in Kansas’s otherwise murky artistic firmament.

BY THE late 1960s, Inge’s reputation as a great playwright had waned. The Kansan authored a series of flops for the stage, and screen work, too, became hard to find. Inge was living in the Hollywood Hills with his sister, Helene, at the time, and on June 10, 1973, at about 4:30 a.m., Helene was awakened by the sound of a car engine. She opened the garage door and found her brother slumped over the steering wheel of his Mercedes Benz, engine running, windows open, dead of suicide at age 60.