Playwright: William Inge
At: American Theater Company,
1909 W. Byron St.
Phone: 773-929-1031; $30-$35
Through: Oct. 29
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs sounds more like a horror movie title than one belonging to an earnest play dealing with a poor family's angst. But once you get over the title, its dated 1950s sensibilities and its seemingly happy ending, …Stairs has much to recommend in American Theater Company's ( ATC's ) strongly-acted production.
...Stairs was gay playwright William Inge's 1957 semi-autobiographical answer to Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical The Glass Menagerie. ...Stairs was also Inge's last major Broadway hit before his writing career slumped. ( He committed suicide in 1973. )
The parallels between the two plays are many. Both have an overprotective mother, an extremely shy daughter, an artistically inclined son and a visit from a handsome gentleman caller that sets everyone in a tizzy. The Glass Menagerie is unquestionably the better play—but if Inge's drama doesn't soar with high-flying poetry, it still can grip you with his characters' dilemmas.
Set in the 1920s, ...Stairs follows the suburban Oklahoma City Flood family and its myriad problems that bubble up during a weekend. Mother Cora ( Cheryl Graeff ) accuses traveling salesman husband Rubin ( Tim Decker ) of dallying with other women on the job. After their fight turns violent, he takes off and Cora despairingly weighs the option of staying or leaving him.
Bookworm daughter Reenie ( Kelly O'Sullivan ) is stressing about a party she's been invited to and the fact that her blind date suitor Sammy Goldenbaum ( Jürgen Hooper ) is ( horrors! ) Jewish. And when he's not battling bullies, Hollywood-obsessed pre-teen son Sonny ( Edward S. Heffernan ) deals with everyone else's growing concerns that he's too much of a mama's boy.
Unlike Williams' isolated Glass Menagerie characters, Inge's ...Stairs principals have a support system of relatives and friends. Sari Sanchez is a hoot as Reenie's ditzy flapper-wannabe friend, Flirt Conroy, while Chris Hart as Flirt's date, Punky Givens, always gets a laugh with his muddied line deliveries. Cora's mouthy sister, Lottie ( Dawn Bach ) , and her meek dentist husband, Morris ( Sean Parker ) , also both add plenty of extra color and humor as they enact the stereotypical roles of overbearing wife and put-upon husband.
The entire company's acting under Damon Kiely's direction is uniformly excellent in ATC's lovely production. The acting never turns too unbelievably histrionic despite some dated character motivations and psychological conceits.
... Stairs is clearly a product of the 1950s, so it's dismaying to see Inge so willing to buy into the outmoded idea that overbearing and dominant women lead to emasculated men. Blame is automatically assigned to Cora's over-mothering for Sonny's sissy-like qualities and her nagging for driving Rubin into another woman's arms.
Still, Inge does find coded ways to bring up the issue of homosexuality in ...Stairs while leaving dense audiences none-the-wiser. Inge also deals with religious discrimination as one character launches into a humorously anti-Catholic diatribe while anti-Semitism brings a shocking ( if too-easily-forgotten ) plot twist to the drama.
The same smirk that Inge applied to depicting American life and old-fashioned ideas in decades past, alas, now applies to his own 1950s drama from an audience's 2006 perspective. If the character motivations and ideas in ...Stairs have not aged too well, at least the strong acting and ATC's handsome period production still have plenty of power to command attention and respect.
