William Motter Inge (3 May 1913 - June 10, 1973) was an American playwright and novelist, whose work usually featured solitary protagonists who were weighed down by strained sexual intercourse. In the early 1950s, he had an impressive series of Broadway productions, including Picnic, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize. With a portrait of small-town life and its deep-rooted arrangements in the heart of America, Inge is known as "The Midwestian Musician."
Video William Inge
Initial years
Inge was born in Independence, Kansas, the fifth child of Maude Sarah Gibson-Inge and Luther Clay Inge. Inge attended the Independence Community College and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Speech and Drama. While at the University of Kansas, Inge is a member of Nu Bab of Sigma Nu. Offering a scholarship to work on a Master of Arts degree, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend George Peabody College for Teachers, but then left.
Back in Kansas, he worked as a laborer on state highway and Wichita news anchor. From 1937 to 1938 he taught English and drama at the Cherokee County Community College in Columbus, Kansas. After returning and completing his Master's in Peabody in 1938, he taught at Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, from 1938 to 1943.
Maps William Inge
Careers
Inge began as a drama critic at St. Louis Star-Times in 1943. With Tennessee Williams's encouragement, Inge wrote his first drama, "Farther Off from Heaven" (1947), which was staged at Margo Jones' Theater '47 in Dallas, Texas. When I became a teacher at Washington University at St. Louis in 1946-1949, he wrote Come Back, Little Sheba . It ran on Broadway for 190 performances in 1950, winning the Tony Awards for Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer. (The 1952 film adaptation won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Shirley Booth Willy van Hemert directed the 1955 adaptation for Dutch television, and NBC aired another TV production in 1977.) While teaching at Washington University that Inge's struggle with alcoholism became more acute and , in 1947, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Through AA, Inge meets the wife of a member of her AA group called Lola and, through her name and personal character, is one of the main characters in Come Back, Little Sheba. , "Lola", is based. Even when Come Back, Little Sheba was on pre-Broadway in the early 1950s, Inge was filled with doubts about his success, as he stated in a letter to his sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, "If Sheba make it in Hartford, I think it will continue to Broadway and if it does not I think I will go back to St. Louis If it makes it to Broadway, I do not do not know when I'll be back. "Inge never returned to St. Louis.
In 1953, Inge received the Pulitzer Prize for Picnic , a drama based on the woman she knew as a child:
- When I was little in Kansas, my mother had a boarding house. There are three female school teachers living in the house. I am four years old, and they are good to me. I love them. I see their efforts, and, even as a child, I feel every woman's failure. I started to feel the grief and emptiness in their lives, and it touched me.
In 1953, Inge drama Glory in the Flower was broadcast on Omnibus with cast members Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and James Dean.
In 1955, his drama Bus Stop aired. Her inspiration came from the people she met in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Nominated for four Tony Awards including Best Play, it was made into a 1956 film starring Marilyn Monroe. The major regional awakening of the Bus Stop was held at Huntington Theater in Boston in September and October 2010.
In 1957 he wrote The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, an extension of the previous one-act, Farther Off from Heaven . The drama was nominated for five Tony Awards including Best Play, and was adapted as a movie in 1960.
Her 1959 drama A Loss of Roses, with Carol Haney, Warren Beatty, and Betty Field, was filmed as The Stripper (1963), with Joanne Woodward, Richard Beymer, and Claire Trevor, and Jerry Goldsmith's popular score.
Natural Affection had the misfortune to open on Broadway during the 1962 New York City newspaper strike, which lasted from December 8, 1962, until April 1, 1963. So few were aware of the game, and fewer tickets. It only lasted 36 shows, from January 31, 1963, until March 2, 1963. What the theater passed was a very strong drama with a fragmented family theme and random violence. Like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood , the inspiration for Natural Affection came from a newspaper account about a seemingly insignificant and unmotivated murder. Play center on single mom, Chicago department store buyer Sue Barker (Kim Stanley). While troubled teenager Donnie (Gregory Rozakis), Sue's illegitimate son, has gone to reform school, he has established a relationship with Cadillac seller Bernie Slovenk (Harry Guardino). With Donnie's unexpected return to his apartment in Chicago, the conflict escalated, and Donnie found himself on a cliff full of emotion. The five-minute closure of the drama introduces a new character, a young woman Donnie meets in the hallway of the apartment. He invites her to the apartment and, without warning, kills him when the curtains are closed. Broadway production, directed by Tony Richardson, benefited from background music composed by composer John Lewis, provided through recording, rather than live performances, and worked in the same way as movie scores. In 2005, the highly successful Natural Affection awakening was installed at The Artistic Home, Chicago. Directed by John Mossman, it was named one of the best productions of the year by the Chicago Tribune.
Inge's The Last Pad premiered in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1972. Originally titled The Disposal , the world premiere of The Last Pad was produced by Robert. L. "Bob" Johnson and directed by Keith A. Anderson through the Southwest Ensemble Theater. This production stars Nick Nolte with Jim Matz and Richard Elmore (Elmer). Production moved to Los Angeles and opened just days after Inge died of suicide. Original production in Phoenix was proclaimed as the 1972 Best Play by Arizona Republic , while Los Angeles production brought an award to Nolte and helped introduce it to the film industry and catapulted the next film career.
The Last Pad is one of three Inge dramas that have an open gay character or deal with homosexuality directly. The Boy in the Basement, a one-act drama written in the early 1950s, but not published until 1962, is the only game that discusses homosexuality openly, while Archie at The Last Pad i> and Pinky at Where's Daddy? (1966) is a gay character. Inge was already locked up.
Summer Brave, produced posthumously on Broadway in 1975, was a reworking of Picnic , as he noted:
- It is not fair to say that Brave Summer is the original version of Picnic . I have written before that I never really fulfilled my initial intention in writing 'Picnic' before we started production in 1953, and that I wrote what was considered an unintentional end to the game finish for practice. A few years after
has been closed on Broadway, after the movie version has been successful, I get the initial version of my file and start working on it again, just for my own satisfaction. Brave Summer is the result. I admit that I prefer the resulting drama version, but I do not expect others to agree. Brave Summer may not enjoy any success on Broadway, or win any prizes awarded Picnic . But I feel it's more funny than , and it fulfills my initial intentions.
Around two dozen dramas not played by Inge began receiving wider attention in 2009. They are available for viewing, but not copying or borrowing, in a collection of papers at Independence Community College. One, three-part drama titled Off the Main Road , was read at Flea Theater in New York City on May 11, 2009, with Sigourney Weaver, Jay O. Sanders, and Frances Sternhagen in the cast. Another, The Killing, a one-act drama, directed by JosÃÆ' Â © Angel Santana, and starring Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel, performed at 59E59 Theater, in New York City, until August 27, 2009. Not yet known how many of these additional dramas are complete. In addition to Off the Main Road and The Killing , the other six were performed in April 2009 at the William Inge Theater Festival, in Independence, Kansas. Six of these are published in A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge .
Television and movies
In 1961 Inge won an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass (Best Writing, Stories, and Scenarios - Written Right for Screen). John Frankenheimer directed All Fall Down (1962), Adge's scenario adaptation of James Leo Herlihy's novel. Inge was unhappy with the changes he made to his scenario for Bus Riley Back in Town (1965), so at his urging, the writing credits on the film were "Walter Gage".
During the 1961-62 television season, Inge was the script supervisor of ABC's TV Stop Bus series, an adaptation of his drama. With Marilyn Maxwell as Grace Sherwood, owner of Sherwood Bus Station and Restaurant in a fictitious Colorado city, this series presents dramas about city residents and travelers passing through restaurants within 25 hours of episodes. The sixth episode, "Cherie", with Tuesday Weld, Gary Lockwood and Joseph Cotten, is a shortened version of the original Bus Play . Robert Altman directed eight episodes, and one of them, "A Lion Walks Among Us", led to a congressional hearing on violence. The episode, starring Fabian Forte as a serial killer ax-crazy, was adapted from Tom Wicker's novel Told By an Idiot.
In 1963, Inge met with CBS to consider an hour-long television drama filmed about a family in the Midwestern town. The series, with six sustained characters, has a tentative title of All Over Town , and is planned for the 1964-65 season. Instead, Inge did a drama, Out on the Outskirts of Town , seen on November 6, 1964, on NBC as part of the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater series . It stars Anne Bancroft and Jack Warden with Inge taking on the role of the city doctor. NBC gave a re-show on June 25, 1965.
Novel
Inge wrote two novels, both placed in the fictional city of Freedom, Kansas. In Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1970), Latin high school teacher Evelyn Wyckoff lost her job because she was having an affair with a school janitor. The themes of this novel include spinsterhood, racism, sexual tension and public humiliation during the late 1950s. Polly Platt wrote the screenplay for a 1979 film adaptation starring Anne Heywood as Evelyn Wyckoff. The film was released with a few titles: The Shaming, The Sin , Secret Yearnings and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff .
My Son Is an Extraordinary Driver (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1971) is an autobiographical novel that traces the Hansen family from 1919 to the second half of the 20th century. This novel received praise from Kirkus Reviews :
- Sir. Inge's novel, narrated in the form of a memoir, is slightly longer than Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and despite the lack of structure and content flakes before the second half, the first part is spotless. in design and focus. It features the early years of Joey, the narrator here, and there is a beautiful scene, as clear as the summer sunshine, with his family and visits to various relatives. The lapse of time between Joey and his older brother Jule - his mother's favorite, my son a great driver, and an interesting playboy in the midwestern world - will never make peace. Even long after Jule's early death from accidental mischief. Here my Act separates itself from Act II, a whole body anatomy from Joey's years as a young man in compressed and fragmented incidents - one of which is played from Miss Wyckoff and which seems unnecessary ( syphilis of her parents). Thus, Joey grows weak, never finishes his relationship with an absent father or his unloving mother, and ends up with "solitude like a no-ending corridor". Inge has told her life story and death and all the spaces in between with gentleness and honesty that give her novel persistence achieved by several writers.
During the early 1970s, Inge lived in Los Angeles, where he taught drama writing at the University of California, Irvine. Some of his last dramas drew little notice or critical recognition, and he fell into deep depression, sure he would never be able to write well again.
Death and inheritance
Inge died of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning on June 10, 1973 at the age of 60 and was buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Independence, Kansas.
Since 1982, William Inge Center for Arts at the Independence Initi Center at Inge's Independence, Kansas, has sponsored the annual William Inge Theater Festival in honor of the playwright. William Inge's collection at Independence Community College is the most extensive collection of William Inge, including 400 manuscripts, films, correspondence, theater programs and other items related to Inge's work. In the March 2008 edition of The Brooklyn Rail, playwright Adam Kraar requested former drama writers Inge House Marcia Cebulska, Catherine Filloux, Caridad Svich, Lydia Stryk, and Alice Tuan how Inge's life and work has affected them..
Inge has a star in St. Petersburg. Louis Walk of Fame. There is also a black box theater named William Inge at Murphy Hall at the University of Kansas.
Work
- Played
- 1950: Come back, Little Sheba
- 1953: Picnic
- 1955: Bus Stop
- 1957: Dark at the Top of the Stairs
- 1959: Losing Roses
- 1962: Brave Summer (rework Picnic )
- 1963: Natural Love
- 1966: Where is Dad?
- 1973: The Last Pad
- From Main Street
- Short Played
- 1953: Glory in Flower
- Murder
- The Love Death
- Call Out
- Bad breath
- Morning at the Beach
- Move In
- Murder
- Movies and TV
- 1961: Splendor on the Grass
- 1963: All Fall
- 1964: Exit on the Outskirts (rework From Main Street )
- 1965: Go back to the Riley Bus in the City small (like Walter Gage)
- Novel
- 1970: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
- 1971: My Child Is an Extraordinary Driver
See also
- Sigma Nu LEADership learning program
References
Further reading
Listen
- Natural Affection audio and interview scenes
External links
- 69366 William Inge on the Internet Broadway Database
- William Inge on the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- William Inge about IMDb
- William Inge Art Center, at Independence Community College, in Independence, Kansas.
- William Motter Inge Collection at Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, Kansas)
- St. Louis Walk of Fame
- William Inge Collection at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas
- The New York Public Library Blog about William Inge and Barbara Baxley
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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