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This is one of the fundamental principles of art. The most interesting to me is that, more than any other American playwright of which I am aware, he possesses Shakespeare’s instinct for parallel plots and characters, and a certain “geometry” of relationships. But also, there are several things that make his work stand out. Having seen and read so much bad realism over the decades, and knowing that simplicity is often as hard or harder to achieve than grandiloquence, I can appreciate his achievements more. But ultimately I came to concede that Inge is well deserving of the adulation many afford him. So, I’m an Oz kind of guy and Inge’s plays are all “Kansas”. Both Truman and Eisenhower were from the Midwest! Detroit was turning out the world’s favorite automobiles! They weren’t Mercedes-Benzes or Rolls-Royces but they were solid and well-made and dependable…and so were the plays of William Inge. If you want to symbolize a certain KIND of America, particularly the kind of America we seemed to be trying to build in the 1950s, Inge’s heyday, you would do well to look there.
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For better or worse, according to a certain line of thought, it might be said that the Midwest is the pristine part of the experiment, the “control”. The East Coast looks to Europe, the West Coast to Asia, the Southwest to Mexico, the Gulf Coast to the Caribbean. This thing we call the Midwest is the guts of the country, everything else being borderland, constantly communicating with what lies beyond. Kansas contains the literal geographic center of the United States. Kansas is the bleak place Dorothy escapes from before she visits the colorful Fairyland of Oz! But there are things to think about. Even that sounds like a drag at first blush. And Inge, who was from Kansas, is often called THE Playwright of the Midwest. Louis, though because of his associations with Memphis and New Orleans, we think of him as a playwright of the South. Like Tennessee Williams, Inge was a gay playwright from the midwest.
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His works seemed conventional, when in actuality they were c ritiques of conventionality, not unlike the writings of Peyton Place‘s Grace Metalious. I was guilty of being dismissive of Inge for many years, mostly through ignorance and a knee-jerk repugnance of “mere realism”. More than a few thoughts, lifted from my notebooks, to mark the birthday of playwright/screenwriter William Inge (1913-73).