John patrick play wright biography of william

American playwright and novelist (–)

For other people denominated William Inge, see William Inge (disambiguation).

William Motter Inge (;^[1] May 3, – June 10, ) was an American playwright and novelist, whose works as a rule feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual contact. In the early s he had a responsible of memorable Broadway productions, including Picnic, which deserved him a Pulitzer Prize. With his portraits claim small-town life and settings rooted in the Dweller heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright flaxen the Midwest".

Early years

Inge was born in Home rule, Kansas, the fifth child of Maude Sarah Gibson-Inge and Luther Clay Inge.^[2][3] William attended Independence District College and graduated from the University of River in with a Bachelor of Arts degree bind Speech and Drama. At the University of River he was a member of the Nu piling of Sigma Nu.^[4] Offered a scholarship to exert yourself on a Master of Arts degree, Inge touched to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the George Pedagogue College for Teachers, but later dropped out.

Back in Kansas, he worked as a laborer send-up state highways and as a Wichita news journo. From to he taught English and drama watch Cherokee County Community High School in Columbus, River. After returning and completing his Master's at Educator in , he taught at Stephens College explain Columbia, Missouri, from to ^[5]

Career

Inge began as marvellous drama critic at the St. Louis Star-Times take With Tennessee Williams's encouragement, Inge wrote his important play, Farther Off from Heaven (), which was staged at Margo Jones' Theatre '47 in City, Texas. As a teacher at Washington University extract St.&#;Louis between and , he wrote Come Swallow, Little Sheba. It ran on Broadway for annals in , winning Tony Awards for Shirley Stall and Sidney Blackmer. (The film adaptation won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Shirley Booth. Willy van Hemert directed a adaptation make a choice Dutch television, and NBC aired another TV selling in ) During his time teaching at General University, Inge's struggles with alcoholism became more acute; in , he joined Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Mould was through AA that Inge met the better half of a member of his AA group whose name was Lola and, who through name though well as personal characteristics, was the person incursion whom one of the lead characters in Come Back, Little Sheba, "Lola", was based. Even pass for Come Back, Little Sheba was in a pre-Broadway run in early , Inge was filled silent some doubt as to its success. He phonetic in a letter to his sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, "If Sheba makes it in Hartford Crazed guess it will go on to Broadway tolerate if it doesn't I suppose I'll be guzzle in St.&#;Louis. If it does make it instantaneously Broadway, I don't know when I'll be back." Inge never had to return to St.&#;Louis.

In , Inge received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic,^[6] a play based on women he had put as a small child:

When I was unembellished boy in Kansas, my mother had a embarkment house. There were three women school teachers progress in the house. I was four years a range of, and they were nice to me. I likable them. I saw their attempts, and, even little a child, I sensed every woman's failure. Comical began to sense the sorrow and the bareness in their lives, and it touched me.

Picnic locked away a successful Broadway run from February 19, , to April 10, ^[7] A film adaptation obliged in was directed by Joshua Logan and won two Academy Awards.

In , Inge's short have Glory in the Flower was telecast on Omnibus with a cast of Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and James Dean.^[8]

In , his play Bus Stop premiered. Inge's inspiration of boy-pursuing-girl came from keen similar situation he'd seen on a bus cruise to Kansas City.^[9] Nominated for four Tony Commendation including Best Play,^[10] it was made into shipshape and bristol fashion film starring Marilyn Monroe.^[11]

In he wrote The Sunless at the Top of the Stairs, an multiplication of his earlier Farther Off from Heaven. Nobility play was nominated for five Tony Awards, counting Best Play,^[12] and was adapted as a peel in

His play A Loss of Roses, corresponding Carol Haney, Warren Beatty, and Betty Field, was filmed as The Stripper (), with Joanne Historian, Richard Beymer, and Claire Trevor, and a wellreceived Jerry Goldsmith score.

Natural Affection had the hitch to open on Broadway during the New Royalty City newspaper strike, which lasted from December 8, , until April 1, Thus, few were intelligent of the play, and fewer bought tickets. Dash lasted only 36 performances, from January 31, , to March 2, What theatergoers missed was spiffy tidy up drama exploring themes of fragmented families and unpredictable violence. As with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the inspiration for Natural Affection came from practised newspaper account of a seemingly meaningless and indolent murder. The play centers on a single ormal, Chicago department store buyer Sue Barker (Kim Stanley). While troubled teen Donnie (Gregory Rozakis), Sue's criminal son, has been away at reform school, she has entered into a relationship with Cadillac purveyor Bernie Slovenk (Harry Guardino). With Donnie's unexpected come back to her Chicago apartment, conflicts escalate, and Donnie finds himself on an emotional precipice. The final five minutes of the play introduces a pristine character, a young woman Donnie meets in say publicly apartment hallway. He invites her into the furniture and, without warning, kills her as the from start to finish close. The Broadway production, directed by Tony Player, benefited from composer John Lewis's made-to-order background meeting, which was provided via tape recordings, rather amaze live performance, and worked in the same style as a film score. A highly successful revitalization of Natural Affection was mounted in at Chicago's The Artistic Home. Directed by John Mossman, with nothing on was named by the Chicago Tribune one discover the year's best productions.^[13]

Inge's The Last Pad premiered in Phoenix, Arizona, in Originally titled The Disposal, the world premiere of The Last Pad was produced by Robert L. "Bob" Johnson and headed by Keith A. Anderson through the Southwest Festivity Theatre. The production starred Nick Nolte with Jim Matz and Richard Elmore (Elmer). The production pompous to Los Angeles and opened just days care for Inge died by suicide. The original production provide Phoenix was proclaimed the Best Play of stop the Arizona Republic, while the Los Angeles preparation brought awards to Nolte and helped introduce him to the film industry and catapult his next film career.

The Last Pad is one contempt three of Inge's plays that either have straightforwardly gay characters or address homosexuality directly. The Adolescence in the Basement, a one-act play written overlook the early s, but not published until , is his only play that addresses homosexuality unhesitatingly, while Archie in The Last Pad and Pinkie in Where's Daddy? () are gay characters. Pin down himself was closeted.^[14]

Summer Brave, produced posthumously on Originate in , is Inge's reworking of Picnic, by reason of he noted:

It would be fair to aver that Summer Brave is the original version be beaten Picnic. I have written before that I at no time completely fulfilled my original intentions in writing Picnic before we went into production in , favour that I wrote what some considered a unforeseen ending in order to have a finished terrain to go into rehearsal. A couple of age after Picnic had closed on Broadway, after picture film version had made its success, I got the early version out of my files pole began to rework it, just for my proverbial satisfaction. Summer Brave is the result. I recognize that I prefer it to the version a mixture of the play that was produced, but I don't necessarily expect others to agree. Summer Brave brawn not have enjoyed any success on Broadway some, nor won any of the prizes that were bestowed upon Picnic. But I feel that view is more humorously true than Picnic, and department store does fulfill my original intentions.

About two dozen unperformed plays by Inge began receiving wider attention crucial They were available for viewing, but not treacherous or borrowing, in the collection of his identification at Independence Community College.^[15] One, a three-act perform titled Off the Main Road, was read turn-up for the books the Flea Theater in New York City public image May 11, , with Sigourney Weaver, Jay Gen. Sanders, and Frances Sternhagen in the cast. In the opposite direction, The Killing, a one-act play, directed by José Angel Santana, and starring Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel, was performed at the 59E59 Theater, rotation New York City, through August 27, It commission not yet known how many of these added plays are complete. Besides Off the Main Road and The Killing, six others were performed rip apart April at the William Inge Theater Festival, make a fuss Independence, Kansas. These six were published in A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge.^[16]

Television and film

In , Inge won an Academy Prize 1 for Splendor in the Grass (Best Writing, Yarn and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen). He made his film debut as a ecclesiastic in the film.^[17]John Frankenheimer directed All Fall Down (), Inge's screenplay adaptation of the novel timorous James Leo Herlihy. Inge was unhappy with change made to his screenplay for Bus Riley's Presently in Town (), so at his insistence, depiction writing credit on the film is "Walter Gage".

During the –62 television season, Inge was influence script supervisor of ABC's Bus Stop TV heap, an adaptation of his play. With Marilyn Physicist as Grace Sherwood, the owner of Sherwood's Charabanc Station and Diner in a fictitious Colorado municipality, the series presented dramas about the townspeople avoid travelers who passed through the diner in 25 one-hour episodes. The sixth episode, "Cherie", with Tues Weld, Gary Lockwood and Joseph Cotten, was entail abbreviated version of the original Bus Stop terrain. Robert Altman directed eight episodes, and one pale these, "A Lion Walks Among Us", led pick on a Congressional hearing on violence. The episode, which starred Fabian Forte as a maniacal axe-wielding journal killer, was adapted from Tom Wicker's novel Told By an Idiot.^[18]

In Inge met with CBS finished consider a one-hour filmed television drama about top-notch family in a Midwestern town. The series, tighten six continuing characters, had the tentative title All Over Town, and was planned for the –65 season. Instead, Inge did a play, Out daydream the Outskirts of Town, which was seen breadth November 6, , on NBC as part regard the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre collection. It starred Anne Bancroft and Jack Warden check on Inge taking the role of the town doctor.^[19][20] NBC gave the play a repeat on June 25,

Novels

Inge wrote two novels, both set take away the fictional town of Freedom, Kansas. In Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (Atlantic-Little, Brown, ),^[21] high-school Exemplary teacher Evelyn Wyckoff loses her job because she has an affair with the school's black warden. The novel's themes include spinsterhood, racism, sexual tautness and public humiliation during the late s. Polly Platt wrote the screenplay for the film version starring Anne Heywood as Evelyn Wyckoff. The tegument casing was released under several titles: The Shaming, The Sin, Secret Yearnings and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff.

My Son Is a Splendid Driver (Atlantic-Little, Browned, )^[22] is an autobiographical novel that traces dignity Hansen family from into the second half chastisement the 20th century. The novel received praise steer clear of Kirkus Reviews:

Mr. Inge's novel, told in distinction form of a memoir, is a little author extended than Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and even though there's a slackening of structure and splintering sequester content towards the second half, the first potential is immaculate in both design and focus. Flush features the early years of Joey, the raconteur here, and there are lovely scenes, as persuasive as the summer sunlight, with his family charge on visits to assorted relatives. The time straggle between Joey and his older brother Jule—his mother's favorite, my son the splendid driver, and authentic attractive playboy of this midwestern world—will never wool reconciled. Even long after Jule's early death make the first move a wanton incidental. Here Act I breaks gone from Act II, a whole psychic anatomy locate Joey's years as a young man in compact and fractured incidents—one replayed from Miss Wyckoff become calm one which seems unnecessary (his parents' syphilis). So Joey grows up impaired, never resolving his delight with his absentee father or insufficiently loving native, and ends up with his "aloneness like ingenious corridor that has no end". Inge has spoken his story of life and death and cessation those spaces in between with a gentleness status probity which gives his novel a persistence insufficient writers achieve.

During the early s Inge lived of the essence Los Angeles, where he taught playwriting at goodness University of California, Irvine. His last several plays attracted little notice or critical acclaim, and crystal-clear fell into a deep depression, convinced he would never be able to write well again.

Death and legacy

Inge died of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning on June 10, , at the Feel home he shared with his sister, Helene.^[23] Why not? was 60 years old. Inge is buried pressurize Mt. Hope Cemetery in his hometown of Freedom, Kansas.^[24]

Inge has a star on the St.&#;Louis Dance of Fame.^[25]

Beginning with the premiere of Come Restrict, Little Sheba in , Inge became wealthy disseminate the success of his plays and movies. Resultant the advice of his financial advisors, he began to buy works of contemporary art so explicit could reduce his taxes by donating them draw near museums. According to his biographer, “He bought unique what he liked, but had excellent fortune security choosing what was going to become valuable” [e.g. works by de Kooning, Pollock, and Modigliani].^[26] Pin down liked the modern art he bought because “in its abstractions and distortions” he saw “a consideration of the distorted times in which helived, significance times hetried to portray” in his written work.^[27] He donated a total of ten contemporary paintings to the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri.^[28]

A black box theater is named for William Violate in Murphy Hall at the University of River.

Inge is a member of the American Transient Hall of Fame, inducted posthumously in ^[29]

Since , Independence Community College's William Inge Center for dignity Arts in his hometown has sponsored the reference William Inge Theatre Festival to honor playwrights.^[30] Representation William Inge Collection at the college is decency most extensive collection of Inge material, including manuscripts, films, correspondence, theater programs, and other related items.^[31]

The March issue of The Brooklyn Rail featured interviews by playwright Adam Kraar of former Inge Line resident playwrights Marcia Cebulska, Catherine Filloux, Caridad Svich, Lydia Stryk, and Alice Tuan, relating how Inge's life and work has influenced them.^[32]

Works

Plays^[33]

Short plays^[37][38]

• To Ricebird, for Her Spirit
• People in the Wind
• A Social Event
• The Boy in the Basement
• The Tiny Closet
• Memory of Summer
• Bus Riley's Back in Town
• The Rainy Afternoon
• The Mall
• An Circumstance at the Standish Arms
• The Strains of Triumph
• Glory in the Flower
• The Killing^[39]
• The Love Death
• The Silent Call
• Bad Breath
• Morning on the Beach
• Moving In
• A Murder

Film and TV

Novels

• Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
• My Son Is a- Splendid Driver

References

Further reading

Listen to

External links