American Blues Theater’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” with Ethan Serpan, Maya Lou Hlava, Philip Earl Johnson and Gwendolyn Whiteside/Photo: Michael Brosilow
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There are several lessons to be drawn from William Inge’s 1950 play, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” now being staged at the American Blues Theater in an intermissionless production directed by Elyse Dolan. One earned bit of knowledge is that those who frequently recite the familiar Serenity Prayer—“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—are most likely not leading particularly serene lives. Another lesson is that the great Midwestern value of niceness, a term much bandied about in this Midwest-set play, should not be mistaken for deeper kindness, compassion or forgiveness.
The Serenity Prayer, attributed to American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, has become a mainstay of AA and other twelve-step programs, and indeed this dark-toned play—which in ABT’s production starts slowly but moves unstoppably toward a shattering climax—centers on alcoholism as both cause and effect of family dysfunction. Male protagonist “Doc” Delaney (played by veteran local actor Philip Earl Johnson, who skillfully captures multiple levels of his veiled, conflicted character) and his wife Lola (portrayed by ABT’s executive artistic director Gwendolyn Whiteside, who is at least equally strong in the demanding role of a desperately unhappy woman who feels obligated to hide her feelings) are locked together in a marriage that has long ago turned rancid, what with Doc’s periodic drunken, abusive rampages and Lola’s own depression, which can never be admitted to or confronted.
Their powder-keg family life plays out in ABT’s compact, thirty-one-seat Studio Theater, which set designer Shayna Patel has lovingly crafted into a mid-century, middle-class, Midwestern parlor, a paragon of slightly cramped respectability, complete with an inner ring of seats for viewers that look like they were borrowed from a suburban den. We are pulled into the ongoing non-intimacy of these wedded strangers, whose twenty-year-old marriage has never recovered from its shotgun-style beginnings and consequent residue of resentment, guilt and blame. (The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and the couple is childless, another source of chronic regret.) Due to Doc’s drinking and resulting financial precarity, the family has been forced to take in a boarder, the college student Marie (Maya Lou Hlava, who has the right ingenue look and style, but never quite makes the role her own). Doc—whose physical relationship with his wife now consists mainly of grudging goodbye pecks on the cheek—is protective of Marie, but his paternal impulses appear to be mixed with other, less acceptable feelings.
Various townsfolk—Elmo the postman (William Anthony Sebastian Rose II), a body-building milkman (Cisco Lopez), a Western Union messenger (Zack Shultz), a judgmental neighbor (Joslyn Jones), and Marie’s hunky, none-too-sensitive temporary boyfriend, Turk (Ethan Serpan)—stop by over the course of the first act. All are accosted by the nervous, chatty Lola; all respond with a cardboard flatness and self-absorption that only reinforces her loneliness. There’s a missing character, too: Lola’s vanished puppy, Sheba, whose absence gives a palpable shape and focus to Lola’s simmering feelings of abandonment and loss.
The first act belongs mainly to Lola; the second to Doc. Director Elyse Dolan nicely catches playwright Inge’s judo dramaturgical move, as he lures the audience into drawing premature conclusions about Lola and Doc, then flips these ideas on their head, revealing underlying truths about their history and relationship. In the first half, Lola’s compulsive verbosity and neediness come off as odd and annoying, as she spills her guts to near-strangers. Our sympathy flows toward her more outwardly normal, if priggish and controlling, husband. Lola’s garrulousness goes beyond the realism with which Inge is associated. The character verges on absurdism, reminding one of Winnie in Beckett’s “Happy Days,” the always-chipper, never-silent woman who is buried in debris up to her waist in Act I, and up to her neck in Act II, while her laconic husband, Willie, mostly ignores her. Whiteside gives a Jeff-worthy turn as Lola, declaring to visitors, “That’s what we’re all here for, to make each other comfortable,” while getting no comfort at all from her cold-fish spouse. In a strong theatrical moment (aided by Brenden Marble’s subtle lighting design) at the end of Act I, a shadow of sadness eclipses the forced jollity of Lola’s face, as she calls for the missing Sheba, the only bright spot in her love-starved existence.
American Blues Theater’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” with Maya Lou Hlava, Gwendolyn Whiteside and Ethan Serpan/Photo: Michael Brosilow
In Act II, Doc’s suppressed rage and self-pity, triggered by his jealousy of Marie, finally break through. In this climactic moment, Johnson memorably reveals both the cracks in Doc’s seemingly well-adjusted personality and the violence and cruelty that are a submerged but ever-present aspect of their marriage. Inge’s play startled his mid-twentieth-century viewers by offering a peek into an addict’s soul, never a pretty sight. The shock value remains, thanks to the almost feral edge that Johnson gives to his portrayal of Doc.
Director Dolan hits the play’s feminist notes hard, an understandable and necessary choice at a time when women’s rights are under sustained attack. The 1950s were the high tide of patriarchal condescension, and Inge was certainly sensitive to the double standard. There’s an interesting discussion of why the female models in Marie’s life study class pose nude, while male models do not. Doc “explains” the rule by noting that “a man is a man, and has to protect himself”—while a woman, who apparently has no dignity or self-image to protect, does not.
Still, there are moments in the production when it seems as though, in her desire to make the play relevant, Dolan has shortchanged some of the play’s other dimensions and not fully plumbed its dramatic depths. Other than the two leads, the characters—including Bruce (Justin Banks), the nerdy hometown fiancé that Marie has been neglecting in favor of Turk, who has his uses but isn’t the “marrying kind”—have a generic, stick-figure quality. And the recurrent theme in all of Inge’s scripts (such as “Picnic” and “Splendor in the Grass”), the psychological consequences of a middle-class culture built upon sexual shame and repression, is only touched on here. Doc’s eruption late in the play is more than a drunken tantrum or a sadistic attack on his emotionally defenseless wife. It’s a glimpse into the shadow side of an otherwise idealized slice of Americana, showing how the heartland’s surface normality can shade into gothic-level oppressiveness and despair.
Inge’s plays are dated, particularly in their depiction of women’s roles and aspirations. But they remain in the repertoire because they still have much to say about isolation and disconnection, which remain defining features of life for many Americans. Inge is often compared with his near-contemporary Tennessee Williams, who dealt with many of the same themes. Williams is the more rousing playwright, because his protagonists fight back more heroically and poetically (if not always successfully) against the forces trying to contain them, and so his work has a tragic and not merely pathetic quality. Getting back to the Serenity Prayer, Williams is the artist of courage, Inge of acceptance. Within that limitation, Inge still has valuable things to tell us about ourselves and our culture. ABT’s claustrophobically intense and uninterrupted production, while not perfect, delivers that message with force and feeling.
American Blues Theater’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” runs through March 22 at 5627 North Lincoln. Tickets are $34.50-$64.50, available at the ABT box office, by phone at (773)654-3103 or online at americanbluestheater.com.
