Inspiration and the Creation of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs isn't the play that made William Inge's career as a successful playwright. That honor belongs to the Pulitzer Prize winner, Picnic. Dark was, however, the play that marked the end of his successes on the American stage. The haunting autobiographical family drama took Inge over a decade to complete, and the mystery surrounding the play's creation is nearly as fascinating as the play itself.
In 1947, Inge accompanied his friend, Tennessee Williams, to a performance of Williams' The Glass Menagerie in Chicago. While history has yet to settle on an official version of the relationship between the two playwrights (several accounts imply a romantic relationship between the men), one result of their interaction is indisputable: after their journey to see Williams' play in Chicago, Inge, then a critic at the St. Louis Star-Times, was inspired to attempt writing his own autobiographical play.
Inge called Menagerie “the finest play he had seen in years,” and within three months had penned Farther Off From Heaven. Williams subsequently introduced him to Margo Jones, who soon had the play produced at her theatre in Dallas. The play was a hit, but Inge met its completion with dissatisfaction. Despite registering repeated successes with Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop, something about Heaven nagged him.
Off and on, he would return to Heaven, tinkering, editing, rewriting. Finally, in 1957, he writes, he "settled down on it for serious." What was it about this already successful play that pulled so much at Inge's heart, and pen? The play had been well-received and opened at a major American theatre. Why would Inge tinker with success when every play the writer touched henceforth turned to gold?
The answer almost certainly lies in the playwright's deep personal connection to the material. In the foreword to his Four Plays, he wrote:
I suppose it represents my belated attempt to come to terms with the past, to rearrange its parts and make them balance, to bring mature understanding to everyday phenomena that mystified me as a boy.
This grappling with the past finds its way to the page in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. The results are staggering, and the connection between the play and the tenor of Inge's childhood is undeniable. When reading Dark, it quickly becomes impossible to separate Inge himself from the character of Sonny, the 10-year old boy full of energy, fits, a suffocating love of his mother, and an obsession with escaping to the local movie house. The entire cast of Dark's characters fills a vibrant emotional palette; Rubin, the vagabond cowboy father; Reenie, Sonny's sister, plain-spoken, plain-looking, and terrified of an upcoming school dance; Cora, the intrusive but loving matriarch trying desperately to hold her family together.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs becomes even richer when viewed in relief to the play that inspired its creation, Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Both plays feature a mother trying to defend her children from the angry external world in the perpetual absence of their father. Williams' Laura and Inge's Reenie prepare for a social encounter for which they are both ill-prepared and utterly terrified. In both plays, the family son is an emotional firebrand, prone to vitriolic mood swings, who longs to escape from their "boring" existence. The landscape of each play is rich with symbolism, including one dominant visual metaphor. For Tennessee's Wingfields, it's the menagerie, delicate, beautiful, and eventually, shattered. For the Floods of Dark, Inge explores the haunting shadow of uncertainty and manifests the fear in the unlit hallway at the top of the staircase.
The Floods, however, meet a different end than the Wingfields. While Tom soliloquizes his family's sadness and prepares to set out on the artistic life at the end of Menagerie, Dark ends with a homecoming, rather than a departure, and the hope that a family may survive instead of being torn apart. Was this the end Inge desperately wanted for himself? Was the hope of togetherness, rescued from childhood by a decade of rewrites, a feeling Inge craved during a life spent feeling like an outsider because of both his sexuality and artistic persuasions?
After Dark, Inge failed to meet critical or commercial success on the Broadway stage again. 1959's A Loss of Roses, 1963's Natural Affection and 1965's Where's Daddy? were all poorly received. After Dark, it seemed as though Inge lost the ability to connect with the pastoral characters that made him famous. He attempted to explore more urban characters and themes, and the final products of his declining craft were two little-noticed novels and a short-lived stint in academia. Depressed at his poor fortune, Inge committed suicide at 60 in 1973.
So, what was so haunting about the material in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs that essentially took him a life to write, a decade to finish, and seemed to strip him of the artistic Midas touch once it had been completed? What ephemeral quality was Inge so inspired to capture after that fateful trip to Chicago to see The Glass Menagerie? The answer may exist only in the symbolic place he creates on the stage of his final great play, the place that represents a future full of uncertainty, fear, and mystery in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
Reference
Inge, William. Four Plays.
William Inge, www.ingefestival.org