IN SEARCH OF INGE’S LITTLE SHEBA

When the Los Angeles Theatre Center started researching its revival of “Come Back, Little Sheba” (opening April 24), there wasn’t a question of where to begin. “Sheba’s” author, William Inge, grew up in Independence in the 1920s, his relatives still live here and the town is proud enough to host an Inge festival every April at the Independence Community College.

Year-round, the college maintains an Inge Library, a big room in the college library devoted to Inge’s books, scripts, letters and press clippings. No American playwright has been better documented, yet there still remains a mystery about Inge. How could the most celebrated playwright of the 1950s have been so quickly discarded by the culture once the 1950s had passed?

That was one of the issues discussed at this year’s Inge Festival, which ended last Tuesday. Another topic was the devastating effect that Inge’s rejection had on him personally. (He committed suicide in Hollywood in 1973.) “If only he had been tougher,” said Dr. Irene Murphy, who had taught young Billy Inge in 1930--his last year of high school, her first year as a teacher. Dr. Murphy remembers Inge as a boy who ran around with the school’s theater crowd--an engaging lad, but also a “vulnerable” one. Success only made him more vulnerable.

There were also remembrances of the original production of “Sheba.” Playwright Garson Kanin recalled how he and his wife, Ruth Gordon, had attended the late-summer opening of the play’s tryout at the Westport County Playhouse in 1949--a cold theater, only 80 or 90 people in the house, and everyone aware by the end of the evening that they had seen an extraordinary new play with an extraordinary not-that-new actress, Shirley Booth.

“I can’t imagine Tyne Daly in ‘Sheba,’ ” said somebody after Kanin’s talk. Daly will star in the LATC production and it’s indeed hard to picture her as Inge’s heroine, Lola--a soft house-bound woman who hardly has enough energy to go out on the front porch and call for her lost poodle.

But that’s probably why Daly wants to do the role, for the stretch. And maybe Lola is tougher than she looks. Erase Shirley Booth’s image from your mind--which is hard to do, if you have ever seen the film of “Sheba”--and it’s possible to visualize Lola as a survivor with more staying power than her chiropractor husband, Doc Delaney.(Charles Hallahan will play him at LATC.)

As with all of Inge’s characters, Lola and Doc are composites. Doc’s drinking problem and his experience with AA are drawn from Inge’s personal history--he says as much on the library’s film-documentary of his life, “From Penn Avenue to Broadway.” Fred Sheldon, a high school classmate, also recalls that Inge once had a little Scottie dog named Sheba.

But, say members of the family, the Delaneys also have a lot in common with Inge’s uncle and aunt in Wichita. Uncle Earl, like Doc, had a “practice” of sorts (dentistry) and liked to do magic tricks. Aunt Helen, like Lola, adored animals. Cats, though, not dogs. Up to a dozen cats at once, in fact.

They were, family members agree, “quite a pair.” And they knew it. When Miss Booth and her co-star Sidney Blackmer brought “Sheba” to Kansas City, they showed up in the dressing room and proudly announced “you’re playing us .”

Considering Lola and Doc’s problems, this was an unusual boast. Inge may seem, at this distance, an optimistic playwright. Certainly the Ahmanson’s revival of “Picnic” last season was a celebration of young love and small towns--a tribute to the movie version of “Picnic,” filmed in splendid wide-screen Technicolor.

But “Sheba” is a black-and-white story, set in a little frame house somewhere in the American Midlands. Inge himself characterized it as “a melancholy play.” Doc is a recovering alcoholic, just about to fall off the wagon. Lola is a lonely, out-of-touch woman who will buy cream from the milkman just to have someone to talk to.

This is a marriage that has nowhere to go but down, and it does so when Doc turns on Lola with an ax. It’s the most violent scene in Inge’s 1950s plays, tapping a rage in him that went underground until his 1963 shocker, “Natural Affection,” and he was proud of it. A writer, he said, had to be allowed to show his hate for the world as well as his love for it.

Shirley Booth’s genius in the role was to show Lola in two lights at once--to demonstrate why she drove her husband back to drink, with her whining chatter about lost dogs; but also to illuminate Lola as a lovable woman, doing her best with fairly limited mental resources. Paul Bigelow, who saw Inge through “Sheba’s” difficult rehearsal period, even gives Booth credit for changing the play’s burden without changing a word of the dialogue; for touching what was drab in Lola and transmuting it into a lyrical memory of the light-footed girl she had been when Doc married her.

With Miss Booth, “Sheba” had ended, if not happily, at least on a note of hope. Lola and Doc would buckle down to making their marriage work. They would hang together, having seen the impossibility of trying to hang separately.

Inge must have had something like this in mind for his ending. But it is possible to play the last scene at the kitchen table in quite another way, so as to suggest that Doc’s and Lola’s problem is only in remission: that his devils will be back and that she will be dreaming about Sheba once again. There is even some textual justification for this. An early draft of the play on file at the Inge Library notes in a stage direction that the Delaneys’ home at the end of the play has reverted to the sloppiness seen at the beginning, suggesting that Lola is already starting to slip back into her old lassitude.

The final version of “Sheba” sees the place all slicked up, indicating that Lola really does intend to keep her house in order from now on. It will be interesting to see if Daly’s director, Ray Danton, uses this ending or the previous one--or finds yet a third one.

Inge’s plays invite different readings. Critics of the time felt that he tended to underwrite his characters, leaving the actors and director with almost everything to fill in. (Inge had been an actor himself, and knew how much a line could say without seeming to say much of anything at all.)

The spare quality of his dialogue can lead to a dull production when the actors bring nothing of themselves to their parts. However, American actors, especially young ones, have a feeling for Inge’s people. I saw a college summer-theater rehearsal of “Picnic” once that left the two actors playing the spinster schoolteacher and her unwilling suitor in tears, they had been so seized by the material. And every year for the last 20 years the Drama Division of the Juilliard School in New York has presented an Inge play.

The plays do still play, and the color can be different each time out. The next time we see”Picnic” perhaps it will seem as melancholy as “Three Sisters.”

Meantime, for the visitor to the Inge Festival, it’s a kick to drive past an outdoor table in Riverside Park and realize that this is where Madge and Hal and Mrs. Horn had their picnic. A lot of people in Independence will also tell you the names of the three school teachers who actually did board at the Inges’ during the winter, and remember distinctly how the town fell apart overnight in the Depression, just like the oil town splendor in Inge’s film with Elia Kazan, “Splendor in the Grass.”

Finally, there’s a rare chance to see the inside of Inge’s boyhood home at 514 North 4th St., rare because the present owner, Mrs. W.C. Cooper, doesn’t open her home to just anybody, festival or no festival. It is a big white house with a circular porch and a separate parlor off the entry way, in the old-fashioned style. But its most famous feature is the hand-carved wooden stairway going up to the second floor. Young Billy Inge got his head caught once, trying to see what was going on in the living room. The visitor peers up the stairs, and Mrs. Cooper knows what he’s looking for.

“I left it dark for you,” she says.