SYNOPSIS OF COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA: Set in the cramped, cluttered Midwestern house of middle-aged Lola and Doc Delaney, the plot centers on how their life is disrupted by the presence of a boarder named Marie, a college art student with a strong lustful appetite.
Overweight and slovenly, the housebound Lola engages in mild flirtations with the milkman and mailman, still playing the role of the ingratiating coquette she once was. She sees in Marie herself at that age, and encourages her pursuit of wealthy Bruce as well as athletic Turk.
Doc was forced to abandon a promising career in medicine when he married the pregnant Lola. Now a recovering alcoholic, he maintains his precarious sobriety by avoiding the past, as well as his sexual frustration of the present—heightened by such close proximity to Marie. She is an aching reminder to him of the youth and opportunity he sacrificed. His eventual realization that she is not as pure as he wanted to believe sends him back to the bottle and a descent into unbridled rage.
The title refers to Lola’s missing dog, who remains lost at the final curtain. So, essentially, do Doc and Lola. Like most Inge characters, they undergo no major transformation, ending where they began—diminished but resilient.
—B.P.1
YOU GET A FEELING for the South from Tennessee, for New York from Odets, and for the Midwest from Inge. The author makes you conscious of the place. In Come Back, Little Sheba, the first impression you get is a lack of dimension: there is no broad horizon, no expansion here. You can’t see anywhere, and it’s not going anywhere; it’s closed in. The text itself is small. On the surface, it revolves around a singular situation: is the Doctor going to lay the girl or not? Inge gets immediately to the emotions at work here. “If this is sex,” he seems to be saying, “I don’t want it.”
But it’s not that simple.
One thing you find all through American plays after the thirties is that the nature of each period is very distinct, and the playwrights are very aware of the moment when they’re writing. Think about that moment historically. You must be aware of America in a particular time and place and set of social circumstances, from their point of view. You start with impressions of the cultural atmosphere that influence the characters and their aims. Later, you work on the ideas.
The Delaneys live in a provincial town without the sun, even though it’s Kansas. It’s the fifties, but their living room has the atmosphere of the twenties—no modern technology, no TV, no electrical gadgets. It is decorated with a “cheap pretense of niceness.” It has a heaviness, a cramped feeling, an old-fashioned static quality that comes from leftover things. It’s a chiropractor’s home without taste, nothing individual about it. The mohair furniture was either handed down or bought on sale somewhere. There’s nothing visible here that has a human hand in it—no antique desk fashioned by an artisan. It’s all machine-made. This same overstuffed furniture is in every store, without refinement or choice.
Inge paints a corner of the American world that is cut off from ideas except the basic day-to-day ideas of eating, sleeping, and functioning. There is no taste for books or music, no quality that ignites the imagination. Nothing comes through except the daily regulated married life. Midwesterners lived with that regulation: you live a certain way, you eat a certain way, you talk a certain way, with no expansiveness. It is a deeply passive, middle-class home where you put things up on the wall that are from your mother or grandparents—pictures from twenty or forty years before. The atmosphere is dim, dingy. Create that atmosphere before you go any further!
The Delaneys are products of the fifties, and the fifties are a product of the postwar prosperity, when there was a tremendous expansion of the country economically. The Depression was finally, really over. America was at its peak in relation to the rest of the world. People were becoming richer than ever before; many were moving west; the old-fashioned “extended family” was breaking up. Kids moved away. The big gravitational force at the center was weakening. It’s an enormous country with huge horizons.
But Inge is concerned only with a dismal section of it. The bigness of the country hasn’t penetrated to the hearts of these people. If you go to the midwestern painting of this period, you see the plainness, the run-down quality. The people look faded. They are kind of gray—absolutely American. It’s a part of America that belongs to you, but you don’t want to be part of it. You must feel this, and the transition they’re in.
Even the language is skimpy, narrow—also without horizon or vision. You can almost reach out and touch the words … A play is a skeletal form, and the soul of this play is not in those words themselves. You instinctively want to speak them as soon as you see them. But Meyerhold said, “Don’t use the lines of the play until they are in your soul!”2 Only when they are in your soul should you say them out loud. Don’t go so fast to emoting the lines.
Those lines are in American English because the play takes place in America, where there is no longer any respect for the language. The language is no longer important. Something else is. Why? We were a country known for public speaking. But it declined. Something in the culture faded out. Always compare your culture to the play’s culture, and compare the play’s culture with the culture that came just before.
Something has been lost, and not just in the language. There is a kind of mist over this whole play, which takes place in a middle-class home and deals with the struggle in middle-class family life. There are many kinds of struggles going on: hot and cold wars (the political struggle), strikes (the economic struggle), cultural upheavals (the social struggle). There is also the inner struggle of each man in his own life and family. There’s nobody to help modern man in his struggle anymore; he is deserted. There’s no more cohesive religious community that he was accustomed to formerly, back when heaven was his guaranteed compensation for the struggles of life—back when the family situation was idealized, and nobody’s children took dope or turned out to be homosexuals! Those things are all changing now.
See, in each play, how the struggle takes place.
Take it easy before you decide how to work on a script. This moment is producing a Lola, who has to be opposite in character to the girl Marie. She has a past that you have to figure out. Don’t add things unless they make sense and you can do them. Get rid of your habit of deciding what she is right away—“she’s kind,” “she’s lovely,” “she’s strong”—don’t do that. Wait and see how she balances out with the other characters.
In Come Back, Little Sheba, you find the loss of tradition. Morality is gone—the new language with its four-letter words, the increasing suicides, the different relationship between men and women, boys and girls—no hint of traditional behavior.
All through the Western world, the old ways were broken. Those who survived and could adapt were lucky. Many couldn’t. They didn’t know how to live without the values they were taught and which they respected. In every period, the one right before it always seems to be better, but in this particular period everything went: the way a woman dressed at home, the way she kept the house, the way religion was treated, the way of social and community life. Why go out to the movies, now that you had television at home for free? The social situation creates your character. You can’t possibly play this play except in the fifties.
Here are some facts. The first is that she can’t sleep late and is sleep-deprived. The second fact is that she doesn’t know what’s the matter with her. The third fact is that the man speaks to her in covered language—“People change, habits change.” From those simple facts, you get a play.
He makes her breakfast, for example. Now, she knows she’s the wife and that she should be making his breakfast. But he’s the one who gets up early, while she gets up late and talks about her dreams. He knows about her dreams. They’re very real for her. She asks him a lot of questions, and he answers. She keeps talking about the dreams and about her little lost puppy. This is the soulful situation of these two people: they have no kids and have substituted a dog for children.
Lola is a kind of American Nora. She’s very loving and childish, and he fell for her. She’s proud of the little things she does, the way Nora is: “I bought this toy for the dog and that doll for the girl!”—“Look what I got today!” She adores her puppy. She has that ecstasy about it. We don’t see that he has any feelings for the puppy. We see he treats her like a baby. She has no vitality, she doesn’t do anything, she’s depressed, she doesn’t keep up her appearance, and the house has a worn-out twenties quality.
He sees the situation, he faces it, he takes care of her. The first thing you notice is no big ego: there’s no Do Not Disturb Me sign on him. You see for the first time an American man of culture taking care of a woman who has lost her way.
Break it down: The little things in life typically belong to the woman, not the man. But in this play it’s reversed. He says, “Here’s your fruit juice. Can I heat some coffee for you? Do you want an egg?” It’s the role of a man who is no longer traditional. He is a doctor and he’s married, but his way of life is now transitional. We don’t know much about this man or what will happen to him, but for the first time we see a situation in married life that is turned around.
They don’t have friends. They talk a great deal about religion. From an Ibsen point of view, that’s very important. He married her because he loved her, especially sexually. He loved her all the way, but he married a woman with no capability of matching his mind—which is what Torvald did with Nora in A Doll’s House. You meet it again and again, from Ibsen on. Men and women marry, but it’s mentally lopsided. The tradition in middle-class European marriages was the woman is weak. She just has to be pretty, she just doesn’t have to do anything. She’s like a child.
So Inge’s American equivalent of Nora, to a fair extent, is Lola, and you must build her character. She is very dreamy and impractical. She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t bother with anything. A good thing for you to do with every character is pick it up, don’t pull it down. If there’s a garden, make it the Garden of Eden. Lift it up and make it higher, because the playwright is not writing on that lowest level. It’s hard to play these plays unless the dreamer is free to fly. It’s not “She’s a slob.” That’s not what the play is about. It’s just “Habits change.”
Inge is writing about marriage. In the play we see that in the middle class, a doctor is no longer an eminent man who drinks port, with a long, respected tradition. Something has gone out of American life in the middle class. You can say that the middle-class life of the doctor has very little poetry to hang his hat on. There’s no poetry in the street. It isn’t in the school, the pharmacy, or the movie theater. Life is run-down.
But through history, in all the different changes, man somewhere keeps a spiritual light. If you don’t see that in this play, look a little deeper and you’ll find that—despite everything—she keeps the dream alive. When an author writes about dreams, he is saying, don’t worry about her worn-out slippers or the dirty dishes—she’s a dreamer. Don’t think the playwright is always saying what the words say. You have to understand realism. In this marriage there are two people: one is a doctor, and the other is a dreamer who depends 100 percent on what Tennessee says Blanche depends on: strangers. She doesn’t really belong to anyone. That’s Nora, too, in the beginning. She keeps it all her life. The husband lets her because he married her, he believed in marriage, he believed that if you vowed to be husband and wife, it meant you were going to create a life of oneness.
He has the virtues of a man who understands that sex and spirit are not about the Bible. He gave her everything sexual and spiritual that he could, but she still got lost. She got lost in the fifties, when everybody got lost. From the fifties on, in American Theater—theater of the capital T—it’s always an analysis of what’s happening in the country, and why: there’s a lot of money everywhere, and in that sense it’s a good moment, but the values have gone down. The doctor sees his patients’ money piling up, but he says he is disappointed in them.
People who don’t know history and discuss themselves in their moment in history will never understand that moment. And if you want to really discuss your moment in history, you have to have background. You can’t just shoot your mouth off. You can’t say that the doctor doesn’t understand history; he understands he is caught in a moment where there’s nothing left that he once believed in.
The other characters in the play show you this: the young man is brutal, the young girl is a born cheat. But Doc likes her. Make it sexy. His wife is childlike. She knows she is alone, without really understanding it, and she gets very depressed. Her intuition tells her, “I’m stranded. I’m alone on this big sea.” She should have never been allowed to grow up. She was too much like Nora. The degree of suffering is the extent to which they’ve paid the price and been emptied. The men are emptied, too, but they don’t suffer to the same degree, because they’re not in a dream state. It’s good for you to know a little about Ibsen to see how closely these two plays are related.
By the way, I was offered this part but turned it down, and it was given to a great friend of mine.3 I sent her some flowers. I had just done two plays in which I was a character part, and I wanted to be “dressed” onstage. Glamorous, right? Irwin Shaw has a great short story about an actress and a playwright: he comes to read her his play, and she hits him and throws him out. That was me. I should’ve taken the part. I turned down maybe five of the greatest plays. I didn’t need it. I like teaching. I really do.
Anyway, Inge’s two main characters here are both in their forties. He married her when he was at school and she was the prettiest girl there. She is one of those women who can’t do anything if she doesn’t belong to a man. They both say to themselves, “I’ve stayed in this marriage now twenty years.” She believes everyone is pure and that Doc knows everything and will tell her everything she needs to know. But he is of no use to himself anymore, let alone her. She didn’t “need” in any real way until she lost him. But then she lost everything, because she didn’t grow up to be a woman.
Now she lives in a little town a thousand miles from where she grew up, she doesn’t know anybody there, it’s a typical scene of American isolation. People are trying to make it in a community without any contact. Yet they are still rather religious, even though the church isn’t cohesive anymore. It’s interesting for you to know that in his desperation, this educated American man looks to religion—something has to help him. You see that he clings to it. He’s lost in Middle America. There’s nobody for him to talk to. There is nobody with him. It’s all money, more money, baseball, football, TV—the whole superficial American scene. It’s in the first few lines: “I can’t sleep late like I used to,” Lola says. “Habits change,” says Doc.
In every play, the first thing is the place. Where are you, what time is it, what season is it? If you know the time, you can play everything Chekhov wrote, because he always tells you it’s spring or winter, so then everybody knows how to dress. If he says it’s raining outside, everybody knows exactly what to do.
So here you’re in Middle America, it’s early in the morning, the school year is almost over, it’s about May … She’s drifting, she never really talks to anybody, she eavesdrops … Don’t make her factual. You must do it yourself, instead of going to the “logic” of it. For someone who is sick, everything seems strange—“I’m here, but I didn’t sleep.” She can’t analyze it, but you can. When does a person sleep well? When they’re safe, when everything is quiet, when they’re really in the nest and the nest is covered. Without knowing it, she has no nest. She doesn’t know where to land. She would never know. Her whole action is to see no harbor. Let these thoughts come out, but don’t expect anyone to hear them; don’t want or look for an answer. She doesn’t really need an answer. You have a piece of great poetry in a dilapidated house with a woman who has lost herself. She is nothing. She’s like dust.
Now, what is Doc? His main action is “I’m committed”—it’s to keep his commitment. Nothing could make him braver: he’s a man in the tradition of civilization. Mr. Ibsen questions the man who stays with a woman out of duty. He doesn’t say it’s right or wrong, he doesn’t ever give you an opinion, but he says you pay a tremendous price for duty. It doesn’t really give you much back. He says people you are dutiful toward will resent you for it. But that’s the man thing: to keep the commitment. That gives him patience and a higher degree of understanding. He wants to say “Have some coffee!” but he sees she is still in her sleepiness, that he has not really helped but deserted her, that in his heart he can’t give himself to her anymore, that she is lost. When he says “Would you like some fruit juice?” it’s weary, not cheerful. It’s “Let’s get it over with.” He’s trying to help, but she doesn’t want him to give her juice. She knows it’s wrong.
Understand that realism is not talking. Don’t go to the words, go to the place and see what is causing you to say every line—what’s making you open your mouth. You have here a rhythm of morning and birds are singing and the whole outside is an opposite to what is happening. The rhythm is there, and it’s created by the actress. Shirley Booth brought something wonderful to it—she was always in two places at once. “Habits change,” indeed! Language isn’t the same, politeness isn’t the same anymore, the things that meant a lot to people who inherited a way of life—little has remained of all that. Lola herself is an example of “Habits change.” She used to be a doll, taken out for strolls in the morning; she was sent for, she went along, her father never spoke to her, she was a virgin … And now look—look how habits change. What he’s saying is “Look how she has changed.”
Raise it. You cannot ground anything in realism. There’s too much poetry. You must not ground it. You have to keep up his commitment—your commitment—for the whole play. When he says “Habits change,” he’s talking about everything—the Bible, living by God, or if not by God, living by the ethic of man, the family structure. He feels it’s not up to us to break these things.
Doc’s way—his action—is to try to take care of it all, right there. He puts the coffee on, he draws the curtains, he gives her the fruit juice. It’s about caring. She wants him to buy her some presents. What size? he asks. “I’m really getting so thin,” she says, “I’m going to be so beautiful by next week … ” To be taken care of is exactly what the place needs: the window needs a shade, so he’ll do that because it’s needed. She needs her fruit juice. It’s all about finding out what she needs next, and then taking care of that. It’s like having a one-year-old child, making sure he’s breathing—that full attention to everything he needs. It’s a very noble action. I’ve only seen it done in a hospital, when a nurse’s whole attention was on her patient. This kind of action isn’t easily understood unless you go into it. I go into it, so you’re lucky. When I give you actions, it means they have some sense.
What is Lola’s action? She says she had another dream about Little Sheba: “I dreamt I put her on a leash and we walked downtown to do some shopping, and everybody turned to admire her—but suddenly I looked around and she was gone.” Lola can’t go to that action in reality, and neither can you because you don’t know where it is. But Inge is such a smart writer, he lets her go there in a dream or reminiscence, because that feeds her. It’s not actual, but she has it. Nobody can take it away from her.
She’s like all the women who can’t take care of themselves in so many of the Ibsen plays. They depend on love. Inge knew this about them, and he’s on their side, and he gave it over to later authors who also liked women. There’s a certain author who doesn’t like the women in her plays, only the men—and in life, too. That’s Lillian Hellman. But that’s not Inge. When Lola goes to reminiscence, Doc hears it as poetry from his charmer girl. He sees this baby standing by the window, listening to the birds and giving him the only poetry that’s left in the Western Hemisphere.
Please don’t think this is easy.
Inge gives you an aspect of young people and their problems then. So go to their historical moment. America in the fifties had reached its most affluent period. The culture was all about consumption, and the target was youth. Mitchell Wilson, a great physical scientist, said that modern man has had ten years added to his life span, but not to his maturity—in America, they’ve been added to his adolescence. You became an adult at twenty-eight, not eighteen any more.4
Youth of the fifties were looked at as being different human beings. It was important to be young, stay young, go along with the young, dress like the young. To be old was to be obsolete. It was glamorous to be young, and the value of being young kept rising. That new affluence brought about all kinds of luxury businesses and new markets catering to young people—clothes, cars, records, motorcycles, etc.—multi-million-dollar industries. The “teenager” with “disposable tastes” was created, and adults to a large extent mimicked them. From now, you buy a new car every year—or you want to.
At one time immaturity was something to criticize. Now, it was accepted, if not encouraged. Freudian philosophy and Dr. Spock’s permissiveness in child rearing hit their stride. “Don’t criticize the child, he has to be unique!” Progressive education placed an inflated worth on adolescents and novelty. It was a confused moment—confused between “You have to grow up” and “You have to be indulged.” The message was contradictory, and the kids came to rebel against it. Their affluent, white, privileged life was guaranteed for alienation and rebellion.
Look at the way they dressed. Listen to the music. That discontent was taken up by record firms, and the music reinforced what to complain about and rebel against. It antagonized older people, but otherwise it was a pretty quiet moment with no political upheaval. It was an age where society was ruled by its children—a child-centered anarchy, dependent on parental indulgence. The child became a part of the parents’ spending habits. There was always money for “the kids.” They didn’t have to work, just study a little, date and lounge around. Teenage buying power became such a crucial force that the economy would have suffered if the parents had tried to stop it.
What were the schools doing all this time? They were becoming less and less a place to train the mind, and more and more a place to train the consumer. What Turk’s brain missed out on in college was largely the university’s fault. They were making big efforts to steer students into fields like “hotel management” and “public relations” and “packaging.” Conformity was crucial: “Don’t associate with the wrong people,” “Don’t be seen with anybody wearing an outdated blue serge suit,” “Don’t be an egghead and spend your life writing essays on D. H. Lawrence,” “Don’t rock the boat!” Did you know that the university was the major American institution to be reshaped by the corporations? Colleges got business-oriented and started admitting more students based on their sports activities and earning potential than on academics. Commercialism on the faculty did a lot to “reform” rebellious teenagers by turning them into cautious, materialistic status seekers, who defined the future by what they would buy and own.
Like any other generation, of course, this one wanted security. For the girls, security meant “the right man” and marriage. For boys, it meant a family and a nice corporate job. But having been “protected” as teenagers from any deeper or more philosophical concerns, they became largely unproductive adults, except as consumers. Kids in Turk’s and Marie’s day were apathetic, cynical, and politically naïve. They took McCarthyism and the bomb as givens. They were vaguely anti-Communist, aware of the Korean War and willing to go if drafted. But, like their parents, they repressed all the problems of poverty, racism, juvenile delinquency. In Europe, the young Hungarians were revolting against the Soviets and getting crushed by Russian tanks. In America, they were having panty raids and rioting at football games.
When Life magazine did a midwestern opinion survey in the fifties, it showed that the biggest fear of young people in Oklahoma was not being able to find a parking place.
So you can make certain generalizations, but you must also understand Turk and Marie as peculiar individuals—don’t treat them as dead stereotypes.
Marie is a boarder in the Delaneys’ home. See the economic situation: for a small-town chiropractor, business isn’t that great, they need the extra income. So Marie pays rent and has her breakfast there. She is a college girl from a relatively refined family. How do we know that? Because she calls Doc and Lola “Dr. and Mrs. Delaney,” which is a little old-fashioned. Nowadays, people don’t call women “Mrs.” Everybody’s on a chummy first-name basis. I’m “Stella.” The president’s wife is “Rosalynn.” If I insisted on being called “Miss Adler,” I would feel estranged from you. But we are dealing with the fifties, and a woman over forty is called “Mrs. Delaney” because she’s married. It gives her a certain status or position, especially in a society with no horizon. There’s a marriage, there’s a Mrs. Delaney and there’s a Dr. Delaney. In this society, there is both tradition and transition.
Pay attention to names. “Turk” is not a real name. It’s a kind of abbreviation; it’s sharp, and he’s sharp. Years ago, to say somebody was “a young Turk” meant he was a kind of revolutionary, a kid who didn’t quite fit in. In the East, maybe he could. But not in the Midwest. In this society, he’s a stranger. He and Marie are both in college. Somebody is paying for both of them to go to school and make something better of themselves. But they think differently. What is the difference between them?
Turk is “studying at a university”—not really studying, but being there. He gets support. He is not criticized for his lack of marks or his behavior, because people come to see him win at sports. College is supposed to give you values, but what kind of college boy is he? He behaves like a bum. He is impetuous, doesn’t like discipline. When Doc leaves, Turk says, “He hates my guts!” He slams the door shut and pulls Marie away from it. He is a man of action. If you’re a man of action, you do a thing, you don’t say it.
Marie says “Don’t be silly!”—meaning, don’t be out of control. In any domestic situation there must be control. You have fights, but you control them. The rhythm of life goes on without being completely upset all the time. Middle-class society is fashioned on rules, but fifties life is getting more out of control. The young people are fighting for some kind of individualism in this regulated society.
Doc is a man who knows how to control himself. He’s from another era, born about 1910. He is a civilized person who can live in dinginess and still be “nice.” In school he behaved, wore a tie, made good marks. He married, he didn’t make passes, didn’t break with tradition. He takes care of what he has, takes responsibility for the people around him. He opens the door for a guest, looks after the boarder. Inge was that kind of a man himself: very polite and soft-spoken. The doctor is much like him. It’s the portrait of a gentle American, who doesn’t hate Turk or anyone else, but Turk thinks he does. Turk thinks Doc is jealous of him. (Hate and jealousy go together.) He is a little worn out, but he has an inherited gentleness, and he does nice things in the home. He makes coffee, brings flowers, runs his fingers through the girl’s hair affectionately …
Turk interprets those things as making advances. You see his crudeness by the way he speaks. He uses the word “crush,” which is dated—today it would be “He has the hots for you!” To Turk, being nice is being a jerk. If you’re in college, you don’t need to be nice. He says Doc should make a pass at his own wife instead of Marie. The words “wife” and “pass” don’t go together. You don’t talk that way about a married woman of forty and a man who has supported her and believed the marriage vow “till death do us part.” They should be respected for that, if nothing else. It’s outrageous from a kid with no background. But everything with Turk is one-dimensional immediacy. He improvises life—which is a tendency of people who are mindless. He always comes in without knocking. He doesn’t listen, he has no language, he’s rough in his judgments and movements, without control. He acts in the living room as if he were in the woods. It doesn’t occur to him that laying a girl should be private.
There is a big threat in this small household: Turk. He says, “I am a powerful bull and nobody can touch me.” He is taking over, tainting and destroying this home by what he brings in—nothing but sex. Lacking anything else, he emphasizes the only thing he has: “I’m a sexy guy, I can do whatever I want!” He’s not going to give that up easily. The hero of his day is the athlete. That reverence for the body and muscle is what Turk can hang on to. He has this macho bulk, size, sex. He should be out in Hollywood making Tarzan movies.
Marie is caught between that and the civilized niceties—between Turk and Doc, the one-dimensional bull vs. the one who has kept the amenities. Turk is an intruder without manners in a house that is politeness without ideas. Dr. Delaney’s life is not brilliant, but it has a regular, civilized rhythm. Turk comes in and acts uncivilized. There are two views of Doc here: Marie thinks he is nice; Turk thinks he’s lecherous. Marie can’t believe a married man would act that way. Her background tells her that older men are not fresh with young girls. She knows that certain rules of morality are handed down, and certain things aren’t talked about. You don’t air your dirty linen in public. You don’t discuss other people’s sexual business. It is not polite.
But Turk breaks every rule in the book. He’d call his own mother “a good lay” if he felt like it. Previously, if your father beat you, you would never say “Go to hell!” or beat him back. But Turk’s revolt doesn’t respect parents, family, education, class—doesn’t separate the older generation from the younger, or one profession from another. He makes no distinctions. What is Marie doing with him? How did they get mixed up with each other? Their realities are in conflict. Turk’s only reality is “You’re a girl and here’s a couch!”
Know the difference between them and how they use the stage. Turk would drink the Delaneys’ liquor when they weren’t looking. Marie would never do that. They’re in a small town where nobody is interested in twelve-tone music or Picasso, just in keeping the home fires burning. Doc and Lola are “nice” people—polite, kind, helpful. In America, money gave the middle class the privilege of culture. People could exchange money for cultivation. But after World War II, the middle-class need for anything more than daily living and good manners decreased. There was no drive to build opera houses in the fifties. People became Mr. and Mrs., settled in, were satisfied with the house, kids, and pets. What did they give up? The drive that made man aspire higher, the intensity that propelled science, culture, ethics—the big advances. Aiming just to be nice is not a masculine drive; it’s a feminine, indoor drive. A man doesn’t walk with a parasol by a lake. He fishes, drains the lake, builds a house on it. When he settles for the walk, he emasculates himself from the big effort. It takes a lot of training and taming to be a nice man in this society—to keep that idealistic civility. Doc achieves it at a big price. He is not a driving force. Where did his drive go?
And on the other hand, why did Turk stop being nice?
You have to examine what a character isn’t to find out what he is. See where the opposites are, to find out how the characters arrived there. Get the solitary situation of everyone here: Each is on his own. Modern man no longer feels part of the community; he is dissatisfied and adrift. Either you conform to the old values or you create new ones. The shift is difficult to make—and not to make. If you go against the conventions of the middle class, how do you survive? Where do you go? What are your choices?
The new set of rules and realities hasn’t quite come around yet. It’s hard to make that transition. Willy Loman couldn’t do it; he was a victim of the changing rules in society. He couldn’t make the break or take welfare, either. Neither can Doc. This is what playwrights like Inge and Miller are writing about. These are social plays. The American progression is from Torvald to Biff to Turk.
But Turk is not you. He doesn’t have the freedom he wants, that complete freedom of the sixties and seventies. “Freedom” is the symbolic word for every new generation wanting to get away from the old one. Women today, for instance, demand to be called “Ms.” and to have equal pay, equal rights, everything a man has—and they want it right now. This is what Turk wants, twenty years earlier. He wants everything now. The breakaway here is with Turk—his treatment of women is totally unlike men’s treatment of women in any earlier period.
The fifties produced Turk, who is dynamic. Doc is not dynamic. They are opposites. Turk is the new, breakaway “beatnik” type. He doesn’t give a damn about Doc, but here he is in Dr. Delaney’s home—this untrustworthy Turk, with a young girl entrusted to Doc. Marie is a nice girl exposed to this dynamic, masculine force. It’s the new macho rule breaker vs. tradition. Marie is in trouble. This place makes it difficult to lay her, but Turk is uncontrollable—he owns everything around him, including her. If he doesn’t like something, he tears it up. He has no sense of what belongs to anybody else, no nuances, just a primitive masculinity. His mind is uncontrolled; he has not picked up a vocabulary to say what he wants articulately. A young Englishman or Frenchman is taught to express himself on both sides of an issue, but the American school system emphasizes sports, not intellect. What Turk wants, he takes. He is ruthless. He gives Marie no overture or traditional rhythms of lovemaking. He is animalistic, with no sense of her. There is a certain bravura in it. Don’t take the attractiveness out of it. That fast rhythm is attractive to people.
A girl of that period didn’t sleep around. Turk treats her not as a girl he might marry but as a girl to have sex with. He has no sense of what it really is to be a male in the society. He just wants her to cut the crap and give in to him. Marie has to pull herself together and do something. She is a passive girl, but she has a strong inherited sense of what is acceptable in lovemaking. She knows conversation in the living room is different from in the bedroom. In the living room, it’s traditional for a man to get up when a woman walks in. Turk not only doesn’t get up—he wants to lay her right there. She tells him to stop. She stops him from being the force—for a while, at least. He quits quickly when he doesn’t get his way. Marie would like to have it both ways: she doesn’t want to marry him, but doesn’t want to lose out on the sex, either.
There’s a disparity between a man and a girl in this permissive society. The girl maintains certain values. Even if she does sleep with him, Marie is “conditioned.” It’s not easy for her to go the other way. She is a girl who likes kindness and gentleness and has a real vocabulary, but at this moment of her life she sees no alternative—except maybe Doc. But Turk is too strong; he comes across as much stronger than Doc. Turk puts down the Delaneys’ values and, with his nasty sense of humor, laughs at Lola’s way of talking.
This talk about talking is important. Nora says to Torvald that in fifteen years of marriage, they never sat down and talked. Marie talks about politics, psychology, religion—mature subjects. Turk is resistant to any subject except his body. She has sex with him, but she still wants to be able to talk to the guy! They are on two sides of the social moment. In all plays you find the discussive element, and this is theirs.
The one thing Turk brings to this discussion is the Kinsey Report, which revealed how rigid America’s sex roles were in the fifties. The male was aggressive; the female was expected to be passive and a virgin on her wedding night. The wife had a sense of propriety. She could enjoy sex but only if she catered to the man. It was about role playing in bed, and it was all very embarrassing to the middle class.
Now, Turk didn’t read the Kinsey Report for educational value. He read it to get some kicks and to give himself some cachet for being graphic and shocking to her. The taboos were very strong then, and they still are now in America. Inge puts it in for shock value. It’s another example of how Turk’s way of talking seems to pull down the whole family structure—asking her, “Did you ever have sex with your grandfather?” Her grandfather the minister, who brought her up with religious values!
If you’re the actor, Turk has to be attractive as this new macho creature. It can’t be “Marie is good” and “Turk is bad.” You have to play him as appealing. Women want him, people applaud him on the field. The audience must make up its own mind as to whether he is morally attractive. If you just say he’s no good, you have no play.
Even though she eventually gives in to Turk’s sexuality, Marie is still going to be a wife and mother. There is no effort by Inge to push for women’s liberation. Kinsey said the married woman during sex was expected to act passively no matter how she felt, but once Turk gets her in bed, Marie no longer has to be so passive. Going to bed with him reveals the other side of her nature. Once that happens, he knows her in her deepest emotional, sexual aspect—better than she knows herself. After that, he’s the boss.
What Inge is talking about, in a larger sense, is modern man’s silent agreement in marriage to give up that I’m-the-boss thing in exchange for the woman’s caring and loving. It is a problem in Ibsen and Inge alike: the man doesn’t want to give that up in marriage, doesn’t want to sit down and talk with his wife about their sexuality. The Inge man resists that; he doesn’t really think that should be part of marriage. But in reality, the price of marriage is to have the man domesticated.
Turk’s revolt is against that whole middle-class system—but it’s aimless. With fascism, you kill people to put your dictator-leader in charge. With communism, you kill rich people to share their wealth with poor people. With anarchy, you kill people to put nobody in charge. Turk’s kind of nihilism has no purpose, no aim. It just wants to break with what’s there, and the need is so strong that nothing can hold it back—not the church, the government, the family, or the cultural tradition.
The image of Turk posing with his javelin is not subtle. “You hold it like this, erect!” he says. This is Turk’s signature. It is what’s going to get this young American male by. Everybody loves the erect sports hero. Turk is the new voice in America. He is saying, you are old-fashioned. You are trying to do something with my masculinity, but I’m going to beat you at it.
The historical moment is useful to an actor. If you get the playwright’s theme, don’t push yourself ahead of it. The ideas come more slowly in Inge than in Death of a Salesman, because the style is different. The author, through his language, is revealing the breakdown of the language. It is extremely realistic, never flowery. Since Ibsen, everybody takes the middle class apart and analyzes it. Miller is more concerned with the social situation of that class. Come Back, Little Sheba is more psychological, and more concerned with these psychologically complex people.
Inge is a fascinating playwright, on a small scale that is emotionally touching. You see people struggle through the day. Inge gives you a portrait of a fair-minded, open-hearted American man who greets everyone with fullness of spirit and hasn’t fallen into judging people. It’s not about big ideas, but about civilized man in his smallness. Modern characters are unresolved. They are not going to win or straighten themselves out. Every modern character pronounces himself from the inside.
The style is realism. Realism has nothing necessarily to do with reality. It is the revealing of truth in each character and situation.
1 Come Back, Little Sheba, written while Inge was a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, premiered February 15, 1950, at the Booth Theatre in New York and ran 191 performances. It was directed by Daniel Mann; Shirley Booth (Lola) and Sidney Blackmer (Doc) both won Tony Awards for their performances. Booth also starred opposite Burt Lancaster in the 1952 film adaptation. An acclaimed 1977 television version starred Joanne Woodward (Lola), Laurence Olivier (Doc), and Carrie Fisher (Marie).
2 Vsevolod Meyerhold’s “biomechanics” acting system was at odds with the method acting concept of melding a character with the actor’s own memories to create internal motivation. Meyerhold believed the actor’s emotional and physical states were inextricably linked, and that one could call up emotions in performance by assuming certain practiced poses, gestures and movements. Among the revolutionary artists he inspired was Sergei Eisenstein, whose film actors employed his stylized techniques. When Stalin clamped down on all avant-garde art, Meyerhold’s works were declared “formalist” and anti-Soviet. His theater was closed in 1938, he was arrested in 1939, forced to “confess” being a spy, and executed in 1940.
3 Shirley Booth (1907–1992)
4 Mitchell Wilson (1913–1973), physicist and novelist, was Adler’s third husband. They were married from 1967 until his death. Among his novels are Meeting at a Far Meridian and My Brother, My Enemy. His most important nonfiction works are American Science and Invention and Passion to Know.