Happy birthday, William Inge

Today is the birthday of American playwright William Inge (list of his plays here).

William Inge wrote, among other things, the play Picnic, and my experience playing the part of Millie in Picnic, when I was 17, changed my life. I was in high school, and I auditioned for a college production (they had advertised the auditions in the newspaper – and I had read a plot synopsis of the play – and realized that there was a 16 year old girl in it. So I decided to audition.) And long story short, I got the part. It was during my experience rehearsing that show that acting became serious for me. I had always been good at acting, it was something that came easy to me. I loved being on stage, etc., but during Picnic I got serious about it. It became what I did, who I was.

The director, a man named Kimber Wheelock, had studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and really knew his stuff, when it came to directing. He also became my first mentor. He believed in me and I cannot explain what an impact his belief had on my life. I was insecure, shy, self-conscious. He cast me in what was, essentially, one of the leads of the play. Millie is the conscience of the play. Millie is the the stand-in for William Inge himself – the one who has ambition, who will ‘get out’ of that stifling small town and make something of herself. She wants to be a famous writer. She is a tomboy, she is not pretty, her sister Madge is beautiful, and Millie suffers by comparison. But she covers up her pain about not being beautiful with sarcasm, toughness, she smokes cigarettes on the sly, she gets in fist fights with the obnoxious paper boy … she hasn’t blossomed yet. She’s still a little girl, even though she’s 16. I was the same way. I was a very young teenager, I never pushed my way into adulthood, I didn’t try to act older than I was … I was still a kid. Sex and boys and all that don’t interest Millie – although over the course of the play that changes a little bit. It’s a massive part, very important. Kim Stanley – the great Kim Stanley – whose name I already knew in high school because of my Actors Studio fascination – had played the part on Broadway in the 1950s. Kimber believed in me enough to trust me with that part … I don’t know how else to say it: having someone believe in me like Kimber did changed my life. I had done a ton of plays before, of course … but Picnic was a turning point.

In Picnic I learned how to research a role, I learned how to do emotional preparation for a difficult scene, I learned how to concentrate, I learned script analysis. I had done none of this stuff before – it had all been instinct. Kimber helped me form professional habits that have lasted. Kimber taught it all to me. I have been in tons of plays since then, and I still use a lot of his methods in my work. I still do a “fact sheet” – that was a Kimber thing. You created a “fact sheet” for your character: three columns on the page, one for Far Past, one for Near Past, and one for Present. And you go through the script and you only put facts down on the page. No interpretations allowed!!! Only facts: “I work at the local diner.” “I was born in England.” “My father left when I was 6 years old.” Over the years since Picnic, I added to the “fact sheet” one more column: What Other Characters Say About Me. This, to me, was very helpful in discovering what the character’s social persona was. To me, the “what other characters say about me” column is the Omniscent column. The Uber-column. Because, of course, the LEAST reliable witness about a character is the character herself. People lie to themselves all the time. People put on a happy face, or they defend themselves, or they cover up what’s really going on. So I found it helpful to have a column where I could put all the “gossip” from other characters. It’s the other characters who can tell you the truth about who your character is. This is just one of the things I took from Kimber, but there is so much more. He gave me a confidence in my talent which has never left me. That’s something else. Kimber believed in me. He loved me. I still remember some of the things he said to me, word for word. Having a mentor like that is really important, because the business is brutal. But if you have talent, it is important to not just use it, but it is also important to protect it. Because it can die. It can be taken away. It can be killed. PROTECT your talent.

Kimber told me that my audition was one of the funniest things he had ever seen – because of this overWHELMing nervousness I carried into the room with me. I was also completely unknown to him. Everyone else auditioning were people in the program at the university, or local people (but all adults). He also told me that I was obviously so nervous that I could barely speak, I could barely look at him, or the others in the room who were watching. But then – when I started to read the scene, one of Millie’s scenes from Picnic – the nervousness disappeared completely.

I don’t usually talk about my own acting here, because it’s hard to talk about, and it seems self-important, but what the hell. I’ll be self-important. Kimber said to me once, “Do you know the moment I decided to cast you as Millie?” I said, “No!! What was it!” Curious as to what he had seen in me that day. He said, “It was when you read through the first scene up there – and you had to say: “Madge … how do you talk to boys?” That’s from the first scene in the second act. Millie has a crush on someone for the first time in her life. Her older sister, Madge, is “the pretty one” – and she and Millie don’t get along … but Millie decides to ask Madge for some tips. It is not easy for Millie. Anyway, the exchange goes:

Madge: You can have the dress if you want it.
Millie: Thanks. [Pause.] Madge, how do you talk to boys?

The “pause” is written in there. So anyway, Kimber told me that I was up there, doing the scene with an actress reading for Madge … and I did “the pause”. And Kimber said he watched my face during the pause … I didn’t speak for a second – and in that second, my entire face turned beet red. A blush just covered my entire damn head, so when I said the next line: “Madge, how do you talk to boys?” – Kimber said he knew that I the actress didn’t know! I the actual actress had no idea how to talk to boys, and that it was SO EMBARRASSING to admit it!! Kimber cast me because I didn’t have to “act” the part at all. It was already so real to me that I blushed on certain lines. I left the room after my audition, and everybody said to one another: “Did you see that blush? Did you see how red she got?”

A director’s main job is to cast well. 90% of a good show is casting well. I WAS Millie already. The girls in college would all have had to ACT like they were blushing when they asked “How do you talk to boys?” I didn’t have to act it at all. I was mortified, I didn’t know how to talk to boys, and I hated having to admit that there were things I didn’t know. Hence: the hot blush. Incidentally: I went on to say that line probably 50 times, what with rehearsals, and shows, and I blushed every time I said it. heh heh I blushed on cue!

I made lifelong friends in that production. I’ll post some pictures from it later.

I have done other Bill Inge plays – including a terrible production of Dark at the Top of the Stairs (Mitchell – member? Member this: “Clown lady’s gettin’ down!”) – but Picnic, to me, is – if I can really nail it down – one of the most important experiences of my life. You know how you have your birthday, where you came into the world? Well, there are other events in life – that also count as birthdays – conscious birthdays. Moments when a new person is born, or a new outlook on life – Maybe some of this is only clear in retrospect. But I knew that Picnic was changing my life AS it was happening. It was vividly clear that I would never be the same again.

So when I read that today is Bill Inge’s birthday – that’s the first thing I thought of. The birth of Sheila through the character of Millie. That long-ago shy awkward teenager with red cheeks, scared of making a mistake, and yet … fearless when I was acting. A strange conundrum and I don’t understand it, but there you have it. That was who I was then. A twisted-up pretzel of awkwardness in real life, and fearless when I was playing make believe. I guess on some level that’s still true. Funnily enough. But it was through Picnic that I first really felt this personality dynamic in me. And exploited it.

I was great in the show. I’m not afraid to say it. It’s one of my favorite roles ever. I love Millie.

So in honor of Bill Inge, in honor of this wonderful and oh so American playwright – I have compiled a ton of awesome quotes about him, and from him. Elia Kazan, who directed Dark at the Top of the Stairs on Broadway – and also directed the film Splendor in the Grass (screenplay by Bill Inge) – has a ton of fascinating things to say about him.

Bill Inge, a Midwesterner (all his plays take part in the Midwest), had a great talent. His plays are well-made plays. The characters he created are, to some degree, archetypal. American archetypes: the handsome drifter, the nosy next-door neighbor, the prom queen, the tomboy … but the plays come to life. They are part of our mythology. And he didn’t write that many. He died young.

Elia Kazan on Splendor in the Grass:

Inge’s story is about a simple struggle of right, wrong, and social disgrace, of what is practical in life and what is best for property and family. It is not my favorite of my films, but the last reel is my favorite last reel, at once the saddest and the happiest. Natalie, just released from an institution and declared sound again, visits her old love — Warren — in the hope that their relationship might be revived. She discovers that he is married, leading a life that’s far reduced from the station his father had envisioned for him, with a rather plain wife who is beginning to raise a family.

What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy. Perhaps this theme rings so true because Bill himself had come to a point where he had settled for less, a place not in the first rank of playwrights along with O’Neill, Williams, and Miller but on an honorable sub-platform where — damn the praise, damn their prizes — the work would be its own reward; he realized that he’d find peace only if he sought goals within the reach of what talent he had and didn’t hope for miracles.

That was Inge’s gift, I would say. If I could boil it down to one thing, Inge’s thing would be: the bittersweet realization that the dreams of youth are gone, or at least diminished somewhat. The feeling of loss when summer is over, when things change. That’s what he writes about.

More quotes and excerpts below:

More from Elia Kazan on Bill Inge, and Splendor in the Grass:

I think the scene where her mother unpacks with her when she comes back from the hospital and explains herself is wonderful. I’m going to defend the picture now. I don’t think there are any characters in our time like that mother. She is absolutely wrong and still she’s able to say what she does at that moment and you pity her. Bill Inge had a very shaking quality, or virtue. He wrote what seemed like Ladies Home Journal literature. Then all of a sudden he’d do something, usually toward the end, that took you
just a little deeper than you expected, and it’s disturbing. You think that the mother is the cliche of cliches, and all of a sudden she says something which is terrific. All of Bill’s plays were written like that. Bill was like that. He was the Midwest. He was Kansas. He set in motion the cliches, but then plunged further. I love the end of the film.

I so agree with that assessment. “He set in motion the cliches, but then plunged further.”

I looked through my old falling-apart script of Picnic just now, and was surprised and delighted at how much I remembered. I could even hear my own voice saying some of the lines, and also the voices of the other wonderful actors.

This one made me laugh out loud, a whole memory coming to the foreground in my mind. It was a line I could NOT GET RIGHT:

Madge: Whenever I hear that train coming to town, I always get a little feeling of excitement — in here.
Millie: Whenever I hear it, I tell myself I’m going to get on it some day and go to New York.
Flo: That train just goes as far as Tulsa.
Millie: In Tulsa I could catch another train.

For whatever reason, I could not, for the LIFE of me, say “In Tulsa I could catch another train” and convey the meaning. I still don’t remember what the problem was … there was something I wasn’t getting in the subtext of that moment … and so the line came out false. And I remember a hilarious (and kind of agonizing) half an hour when Kimber honed in on me, and made me say that line again and again and again until all sense was lost. I resorted to putting the emphasis randomly on different words, to see if that would work.

In Tulsa I could catch another train.
In Tulsa I could catch another train.
In Tulsa I could catch another train.

Ad nauseum. I eventually got it … I eventually knew what I was saying, and hence knew HOW to say it … but I laughed, remembering my floundering about (probably beet red) – trying to get it right.

This got the biggest laugh in the show:

Rosemary (to her long-time boyfriend Howard): Can’t you dance that way?
Howard: Golly, honey, I’m a businessman.

The following excerpt from Picnic is where we see that Bill Inge has placed himself in the play – in the character of 16 year old Millie. She is his voice, his mouthpiece.

Millie: Madge is in love with that crazy guy. She’s in there crying her eyes out.
Flo: Mind your business and go to school.
Millie: I’m never gonna fall in love. Not me.
Mrs. Potts: Wait till you’re a little older before you say that, Millie-girl.
Millie: I’m old enough already. Madge can stay in this jerkwater town and marry some ornery guy and raise a lot of dirty kids. When I graduate from college I’m going to New York, and write novels that’ll shock people right out of their senses.
Mrs. Potts: You’re a talented girl, Millie.
Millie: I’ll be so great and famous — I’ll never have to fall in love.

Bill Inge, before he became a hugely successful playwright, was a drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, living in (duh) St. Louis, Missouri. In the fall of 1944, he got an assignment: he was to interview a playwright, from New York, who was home in St. Louis at the time, visiting his parents before his new play opened in Chicago. That playwright turned out to be Tennessee (Tom) Williams, and the play about to open in Chicago was Glass Menagerie. So there was no inkling yet, of what was to come in this young man’s life. The two became friends, in a casual way. Inge was a huge drinker – as was Tennessee – so for two weeks, during Tennessee’s visit home – they sat around in bars all day long, talking like maniacs. Drinking like maniacs, too, but in that two weeks, an intense friendship formed. Tennessee later said that he never had as good a time at home as he did during that visit. He had met a kindred spirit, in this Midwestern hard-drinking yet sensitive newspaperman. Inge later said that all Tennessee could talk about was his new play, and he listened, he listened to Tennessee talk about his childhood in St. Louis, all the background of the play … but Inge just didn’t get the vibe that this guy was a genius. Tennessee didn’t carry himself like a serious artiste – he was a craftsman, he worked really hard at his art, but he also was a fun-loving loud-laughing drink-buddy. Bill Inge had no idea what kind of play this Glass Menagerie was, and didn’t think much about it.

In December, when it opened, Inge traveled up to Chicago to see it. This particular production is now in the theatrical history books, one of the most famous and most referred-to stage productions of the 20th century. OH HOW I WISH I could have been there. Here is Inge’s description of his experience, watching that play:

I sat in a half-filled theatre but I watched the most thrilling performance of the most beautiful American play I felt I had ever seen. I had the feeling at the time that what I was seeing would become an American classic…I was expecting a good play, yes, but I didn’t know that I was going to encounter a work of genius … The play itself was written so beautifully, like carved crystal and so it was a stunning experience for me and it shocked me alittle, too, to suddenly see this great work emerge from a person that I had come to know so casually.

Beautiful, right? But then Inge lets us see the darkness beneath in his next comment:

From then on, I held Tennessee in a reverence that made the casual quality of our friendship almost impossible … I think from that time on we were always a little self-consscious with each other.

Interesting. Kind of a Mozart – Salieri thing. Although Bill Inge’s plays are no small thing! They are, however, very much a part of the 1950s. It’s hard to do them now without them seeming dated. You can’t lift them out of that decade, like you can do with Shakespeare, and other great timeless plays. Inge’s plays are inextricably intertwined with 1950s America, specifically 1950s Midwestern America. The mores are different, the concerns are different … the writing is gorgeous, but the world is a specific time and place. In the same way that you just can’t lift Clifford Odets out of the 1930s and have it work. You have got to see them in the context of that time. Odets’ plays belong in that decade, you cannot remove them from the world outside the theatre. Bill Inge’s plays are a little bit like that. Flashes of wild poetry, deep piercing sadness and loss, a bit of madness hovering on the edge of everything … all of it seen through the filter of the squeaky-clean don’t-talk-about-scandal sexually-repressed 1950s. Sexual repression is his main theme. Madge sleeps with Hal in Picnic, on the night of the picnic. If you want to see why that play belongs in the 1950s, and why it is, by definition now – a “period piece” – read that play and read the scene between Madge and Hal, directly following the consummation. Oh, what a sad sad frightening scene. Surrounding that scene is the entire world of the 1950s – you can’t get away from it. It is a product of its time. No less effective … but you can see the difference, somehow, when held up against his friend’s Tennessee Williams’ plays. Williams’ plays transcend time and place. They are universal. There are, of course, elements from times gone by mentioned in his plays – gas lamps, street cars … but those don’t seem to cement the plays in a specific time. That’s the magic of Williams. Inge has other kinds of magic, and there is a level of universality in his work, but not like Williams achieved. Inge knew this, and it was a bitter pill to swallow. The Salieri pill. Of course Inge is FAR from mediocre. But everyone would feel mediocre if they compared themselves to Tennesee Williams or Mozart. (Interestingly enough, people always refer to Tennessee’s “Mozartian giggle”. Or that he “laughed like Mozart”. His laugh was one of his defining characteristics.)

Before Glass Menagerie moved from Chicago to New York, Tennessee came back to St. Louis again, to regroup, to rest before the Manhattan onslaught. Inge, after seeing Glass Menagerie had had a revelation about his own life. (So many people who saw that production had the same response. So many people who were not famous, who were adrift, who had random dreams they didn’t know how to clutch at … saw that show, and decided then and there, this is for me. And these are people who later went on to be giants in the field. I mean, really. It boggles the mind. What a production it must have been!) So Inge was one of the many whose lives were totally changed by the first production of Glass Menagerie. He knew he had things to say, he knew he had stories to tell – from his own life, in Kansas, in Missouri – he had deep things to say about Midwestern American life. This was his destiny. During Tennessee’s brief visit home, the two hooked up again, and caroused the nights away. Inge was hyped up, excited, frightened – confided in Tennessee “that being a successful playwright was what I most wanted in the world.”

And that’s just what Inge did. And he had a damn good run. He had a series of huge successes – massive – throughout the 50s – many of them which were then turned into successful and Oscar-winning films: Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic (which won him the Pulitzer), Bus Stop, and finally – in 1957 – The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Another smash hit. Sadly, it would be his final hit. He continued to write, but one failure followed another … and he went into a spiral downward through the 1960s. His only success during that time was the screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, in 1961. It kind of proves my point: that Inge’s success belonged to the 1950s. Once a new decade came, with new concerns, new language, a new sensibility, Inge couldn’t adapt. He kept trying, though – but his failures ended up eating him alive – he thought he couldn’t write anymore. William Inge killed himself on June 10, 1973.

Here is what Kazan had to say – about the psychological fragility of William Inge:

Arthur Miller has become, as he had to become, a stubborn, unyielding man. There have been times when, despite a fair-minded and democratic front, he has unmasked a truer self. When he has been dissatisfied with the rehearsal performance of one of his plays, for instance, he has stepped over the prone body of his director and lectured his cast. His theme was always: “My reputation is international, and it is at stake here. For the time being, it is in your hands, and you are failing me.”

A contrasting influence is that of Bill Inge, but his gentleness on occasion amounted to self-betrayal. In a crisis, rather than protest, he’d leave town to avoid unpleasantness. The arrogance of Miller was truer and more effective and easier on the psyche. Inge died young. Miller is still going strong.

Sad. Inge was a gentle soul. He couldn’t take it. As long as his outer life supported him, as long as the externals were happy and successful – he could make it. But a decade of bad luck ruined him. He was deeply loved by many. And yet many of his dearest friends were not surprised when he took his life. They were sad, but they were not surprised.

Elia Kazan directed Dark at the Top of the Stairs. I find the following excerpt intensely moving. Kazan is so honest, I love his writing. This is from his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life:

I undertook the production of a new play that Molly [Kazan’s wife] strongly recommended to me, William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. I can’t say I was wildly excited about this work…However, I was to learn a lesson as I went on with the play, which is that all Bill’s work — his other plays and the film that I would do with him a couple of years later — seemed on first view to be conventional mid-America stuff, with nothing that hadn’t been seen and said before. But all of it suddenly, to the audience’s surprise as well as my own, would produce scenes of exceptional poignancy — not thunder and lightning, but insight and tenderness, Inge’s own gifts. And always a quiet terror — which is what Bill had lived through and survived. His work, furthermore, provided actors with exceptional opportunities for good performances, climaxing in moments that revealed their best gifts. This was not because of what they’d been given to say by the author but because of the underlying emotions, the ones Bill had felt when he wrote the scenes. Someone like Barbara [Kazan’s mistress – later his second wife] would call the play “tame”, but a wiser woman, Molly, saw that what started as conventional and unchallenging would, as the play progressed, produce moments that were surprisingly affecting. Molly predicted this about Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Theatre pieces are not for reading, she said, but for performing.

Dark at the Top of the Stairs was Bill’s fourth smash hit in a row. We opened for a tryout in Philadelphia, and the reaction was “mixed” — that is, disappointing. Next morning Bill had disappeared, was nowhere to be found. I needed him to do some work, even though most of what had to be done was my job and the actors’. A couple of days later Bill reappeared, looking just the least bit shamefaced. I said nothing; no one said anything; we didn’t have to. Bill had years of forgiving himself and going on. We set to work together, and when the play opened in New York, it deserved the acclaim it received.

William Inge had a lot of demons. But while he was still able to work, for those 10 productive years, he was able to sublimate all of those demons, and put it all into his plays. Once his writing skill left him, the demons took over.

And finally, I will end this huge post with a sketch of William Inge – again from Kazan, who truly loved the man:

I developed a great fondness for Bill and, I believe, he for me. In New York, I began to see him and enjoy his temperate goodness, so different from the overheated emotional lives of other authors I’d worked with. His telephone calls to me were quiet but, in fact, ardent reaches for companionship — a meal, a stroll, a talk. It took some time before I began to detect what was desperate there. I sensed some mystery in his past, began to believe he might have been damaged psychically at some time. I found out that he’d been a patient at the Austen Riggs institute in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I noticed that his apartment in New York was on the second floor, just one floor above the concrete backyard of the apartment building, and had no other view. One day I asked why he didn’t change it for another apartment, one with an attractive view, high above the dirt and noise. We were good friends by then, and he told me that it was because where he was now, no matter how depressed he became, he would not ever be tempted to suicide. Years later I’d remember that conversation.

I noticed things that were childlike about him. Sometimes he spoke like a mother’s darling boy. He’d use phrases that had to be hangover from the table talk of his youth. “I think I’ll have my supper now,” he’d say; not “supper”, but “my supper,” just as his mother, standing at the foot of the stairs, might have called up to where he waited above in the dark: “William, your supper is ready.” Bill became very fond of Molly, particularly for that side of her which had appealed to Montgomery Clift, another sexual borderline case. They both valued Molly’s motherliness. Bill, later in life, was to live with his sister. He never made an enduring intimate connection, and the years after his youth’s big vigor were sad ones. Not surprisingly, his best subjects were small events within the confines of a family fold and rarely broke loose outside. Nor did he.

He is the most American of playwrights. I can’t imagine his plays doing well in other countries, in other cultures. Arthur Miller scored a massive success when Death of a Salesman was done in China in the 1980s. Massive. 1980s China responded to that play in exactly the same way that America had responded to that play in the 1940s. The universality of the themes. Completely different culture? It didn’t matter. Miller had tapped into something about the human race.

Inge’s plays depend on the prairies of Kansas, the corn fields of middle America, the small-town concerns of average Americans. It’s rooted in a time and place. He GOT America, he GOT America in a way that few other playwrights have.

He should be cherished and remembered.