TT: Return of a master

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two plays, Come Back, Little Sheba and Almost an Evening. Here’s a sample.
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What happened to William Inge? Between 1950 and 1957 he racked up a stunning track record on Broadway–four plays, four hits–and all of his theatrical successes were turned into big-budget Hollywood movies with blue-chip casts. (“Bus Stop” starred Marilyn Monroe, while the Pulitzer-winning “Picnic” featured William Holden and Kim Novak.) For a time critics ranked him right behind Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. But Inge lost his sureness of touch as the buttoned-down ’50s gave way to the unsettled ’60s, and after a string of flops, he fled to California to teach and drink, dying by his own hand in 1973. Unlike his more celebrated colleagues, he then vanished down the memory hole, and except for a pair of failed revivals of “Bus Stop” and “Picnic” in the mid-’90s, none of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1975. Thus it is very big news indeed that “Come Back, Little Sheba” has just been revived on Broadway for the first time since the original production opened there 57 years ago–and that this deeply moving revival, which stars S. Epatha Merkerson of “Law & Order,” is pitch-perfect from curtain to curtain.
A good staging can’t save a bad play, but it can paper over the cracks in a creaky one, so I want to start off by saying that “Come Back, Little Sheba” is close to flawless. I’d never seen it on stage prior to this revival, and I had no idea what a wallop it packed. It is, like all of Inge’s major plays, a tale of disappointment and frustration set against a shabby, penny-plain backdrop of ordinary middle-class life–you might be watching an Edward Hopper painting come to life–and much of its impact arises from the patience with which the author deals his thematic cards, waiting until just the right moment to throw down his hand and fill the stage with pain and sorrow….
I’m no fan of the Coen brothers, whose smirking nihilism has always left a nasty taste in my mouth. Still, you can’t help but respect the sheer professionalism of films like “Fargo,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “No Country for Old Men,” and so I was eager to see what “Almost an Evening,” Ethan Coen’s playwriting debut, might have to offer. The answer, as befits a nihilist, is nothing whatsoever….
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Read the whole thing here.