Richard Termine for The New York TimesJ. J. Kandel, left, and Neal Huff in “The Killing,” a rediscovered Inge one-act that is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters.
The New York Times
August 6, 2009
In a small Kansas town that inspired some of 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.’ ”
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
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