Come Back Little Sheba

Reviewed by Bill Raden

The reputation that William Inge has taken away from the 1950s, when he was the toast of both Broadway and Hollywood, is as a Freudian-inclined chronicler of the sexually disenfranchised. In plays and screenplays that skirted the classical line between comedy and tragedy — stories of middle-class characters from the heartland defeated and distorted by frustrated desire —Inge’s schematically structured plays would seem in theory to lend themselves to the new naturalism offered by method acting.

In practice, however, the results, unfortunately — at least if the films are any evidence — tend to be a melodramatic flattening of a more latent poetry of hysterical excess that one suspects is always imminent in Inge’s language and just waiting to be unleashed by a particularly inspired and perceptive production.

This revival of Come Back Little Sheba, alas, is not that production. Which is not to say that co-directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez’s lush staging isn’t perfectly respectable and occasionally even resplendent, merely that it falls far short of rehabilitating Inge to what may be his rightful place as the theater’s modernist father of the comic grotesque.

What “plot” there is consists of little more than the situational equivalent of a gun locked and loaded and just itching to go off: Middle-aged Doc (a capable Geoff Elliott), a chronic alcoholic who drank away both a medical career and a sizable family inheritance, is a mere 11 months sober and rebuilding his life; by paying too much unsavory attention to Doc, the overly frisky and friendly young boarder Marie (Lili Fuller) torments his frumpy potato of a chatty wife Lola (the marvelous Deborah Strang).

Very early in Act 1, that gun is primed in the reveal of an unopened quart of whisky sitting on the top kitchen shelf of designer Stephen Gifford’s semi-realistic set. It is then quietly cocked in the yawning irony of the silence that follows Doc’s offhand comment, “Most alcoholics are disappointed men,” and Lola’s unthinking response, “But you aren’t disappointed, are you?” Its hair trigger appears in the sexual attraction between Maria and the almost ludicrously virile Turk (Miles Gaston Villanueva).

Even as the truth emerges to just how frighteningly deep Doc’s disappointments, delusions and resentment truly run, this production becomes almost wholly owned by Strang’s heart-tearing expression of Lola’s unsatisfied yearnings, and the voyeuristic, life-affirming pleasure she takes in Maria’s sexual recklessness.

However, even Strang’s outstanding performance cannot finally blow the cobwebs off of a play that continues to feel zippered up in a hoary straightjacket of mid-century psychological realism. Maybe a director with a Charles Ludlam-grade grasp of Sheba’s ingrained absurdities, but the Elliotts are only halfway there.

A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena; Thurs., May 15 @ 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through May 17. (626) 356-3100, anoisewithin.org.