Rediscovered: William Inge Scripts
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/theater/06inge.html?_r=1
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"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."
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."
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