Come Back, Little Sheba by William Inge

First published: 1950

First produced: 1950, at the Booth Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The 1940’s

Locale: A Midwestern college town

Principal Characters:

• Doc Delaney, an alcoholic chiropractor
• Lola Delaney, his wife
• Marie, the Delaneys’ boarder
• Turk, Marie’s muscular lover
• Bruce, Marie’s fiancé, who lives out of town

The Play

In Come Back, Little Sheba, Lola Delaney, fat, forty, and childless, has been married to Doc, a chiropractor whom she has driven to drink, for about twenty years. Doc seemingly had ahead of him a glorious future as a physician until he met Lola, a nubile beauty queen, whose father approved of few of her boyfriends. Doc was smitten but was slow to act; it took him a year to muster the courage to kiss Lola. Once he overcame his initial reticence, however, he promptly proceeded to impregnate her. Their marriage followed quickly, and Doc’s plans to become a doctor were scuttled for less ambitious ones.

Lola, too shy to go to a male obstetrician for her delivery, went instead to a midwife. The midwife botched the delivery, the baby died, and Lola was left barren. When the curtain rises, the main interest in Lola’s life has become her little white dog, Sheba, now lost. Lola looks for her and calls her, but Sheba does not return.

The Delaneys’ boarder, Marie, is an art student at a nearby college. Because her fiancé, Bruce, lives in another town, she has as well a casual sex partner, Turk, a brawny javelin-thrower, long on muscles and short on brains. Lola encourages Marie’s dalliance with Turk because she lives vicariously through their encounters.

Doc, replete with Oedipal hang-ups, is in love with Marie and uses her to feed his Madonna complex. He does not make any moves toward her, but he does pick up her scarf and fondle it, and his expression when he sees her reflects his love. (At such times, Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” 1825, is used by the playwright as background music to show Doc’s illusions of Marie’s purity.)

Much of the business of the play is accomplished during the slatternly Lola’s long talks with the neighbor, the milkman, and the mailman. Lola will talk to anyone who will listen, and because when she talks she tells everything, William Inge can use her as a one-woman chorus to provide necessary background information.

The play moves slowly but deliberately toward Doc’s drunk scene. Since he became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous a year ago, Doc has not been drinking. He chides Lola mildly because she has allowed Turk to spend the night with Marie just before Bruce is to visit; she has also allowed Turk to pose virtually naked while Marie sketches him. The breaking point comes when Doc arrives at his usually unkempt house and finds that Lola has spruced everything up, has the table set with the fine Haviland china his mother gave them as a wedding gift, and is preparing an exquisite dinner for Marie and Bruce.

Doc pulls the cloth from the table, sending the china crashing to the floor; that rash act leads to his drunken tirade, which in the Broadway production lasted seventeen minutes and became so violent that Sidney Blackmer, who played Doc in the first Broadway run, injured himself several times in acting the scene. Doc winds up in the drunk tank at a local hospital. Lola calls her mother and begs to be allowed to come home, but her mother makes it clear that she cannot. Lola has no place to turn. She also has no skills that would enable her to make a living if she did leave. When Doc is released from the drunk tank, he comes home and begs Lola not to leave him, promising never to drink again if she will stay. As in most of Inge’s plays, the solution represents a significant compromise between two people who need rather than love each other.

Lola’s dream sequences in the play are particularly significant. Strongly phallic, they presage her inevitable reconciliation with Doc. More important, however, the dreams lead Lola to realize that Sheba is dead. She dreams of her dog lying in a field, mud discoloring her white coat. Lola gives up looking for Sheba; she has at last accepted the disappearance of her youth.

A turning point occurs when Lola straightens up her usually disheveled house. She fills out the order slip for the milkman instead of trapping him into having a tedious conversation with her when he rings the bell to take her order. The resolution of the play’s conflict suggests that the best that one can hope for in life is an interdependency that keeps people from being alone.

Dramatic Devices

Inge has been commended for the realism of his early plays, and Come Back, Little Sheba is a prime example of this realism. The play’s set is drab and, during most of the play, cluttered and sloppy. Lola’s dress and demeanor reflect that she has given up caring. The emotional tone of the play is reinforced by the set.

Inge has been criticized for the slow buildup to Doc’s drunk scene, which, to some viewers, is tiresome. Inge, however, planned this aspect of the play very deliberately. He likened the force of the drunk scene, which is the play’s center, to that of a tornado. He wanted the play to reflect that period of almost eerie quiet that precedes a storm. Then he wanted the “tornado” to burst forth in its incredible fury and to command the total attention that such a phenomenon does in nature. The drunk scene transfixes an audience almost lulled into lethargy by the preceding calm. As theater, this approach works well; Doc’s fury commands the full attention of the audience.

Some early critics questioned the psychological validity of the dream sequences. After he wrote them, Inge had them read by psychiatrists to check their psychological accuracy, and the scenes stood up to their scrutiny. They are now generally viewed as essential, psychologically convincing elements in the play.

Critical Context

The playwrights with whom William Inge is most frequently and accurately compared are Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Inge’s early plays are the first in the United States to deal seriously with the Midwest. Aside from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (pr. 1943), based on Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs (pr. 1931), the Midwest had been dealt with more in novel and poetry form than in drama.

It is not likely that William Inge would have written Come Back, Little Sheba had he not gone to see Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944, pb. 1945) in Chicago shortly after he interviewed Williams as part of his job as drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times. When he saw The Glass Menagerie, Inge realized that moving drama could be written about the lives and concerns of ordinary, everyday people. Within three months, he had written his first play about the Midwest, Farther off from Heaven (pr. 1947), which Williams was instrumental in having produced at Margo Jones’s Little Theater Group in Dallas, Texas. Before he saw The Glass Menagerie in 1944, Inge had known that he had story ideas, but seeing the play and knowing its author spurred Inge into actually writing.

Shortly before Inge sent his first play to Broadway, Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949) engaged audiences with the pathetic character of Willy Loman, a common man the sum total of whose life was his family, his house, on which the mortgage had just been paid off, and his illusions. When Willy was robbed of his illusions, he could not go on living; he killed himself to avoid total disillusionment. Life for Inge’s characters is really no better than it was for Willy Loman, but Inge suggests a different solution to the problem—go on living, whatever the cost. Inge’s message is continuance: his characters are not the dreamers found in The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman.

Inge had planned to write a one-act play based on his unpublished short story about Doc and Lola Delaney. By early 1949, his play was a full-length, two-act drama in six scenes. Inge had just been through a round of unsuccessful therapy in Alcoholics Anonymous and had gained from the experience an accurate view of alcoholism that he translated into his credible depiction of Doc Delaney. Inge read the play to Williams, who immediately wired his agent, Audrey Wood, about it. Within days, the Theatre Guild had taken an option on it. In less than a year, Come Back, Little Sheba was on Broadway, with Shirley Booth as Lola. It was remarkably successful for a first play by an unknown writer.

Sources for Further Study

Burgess, Charles E. “An American Experience: William Inge in St. Louis, 1943-1949.” Papers on Language and Literature 7 (1976): 438-468.

Diehl, Digby. “Interview with William Inge.” Behind the Scenes: Theater and Film Interviews from the Transatlantic Review, edited by Joseph F. McCrindle. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.

Herron, Ira Honaker. “Our Vanishing Towns: Modern Broadway Versions.” Southwest Quarterly 51 (Summer, 1966): 209-220.

Inge, William R. A Rustic Moralist. Manchester, N.H.: Ayer, 1977.

Kansas Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1986).

Leeson, Richard M. William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

McClure, Arthur F. William Inge: A Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1982.

Miller, Jordan Y. “William Inge: Last of the Realists?” Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring, 1970): 17-26.

Mitchell, Marilyn. “William Inge.” American Imago 35 (1978): 297-310.

Shuman, R. Baird. William Inge. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989.