The people who were teenagers when Norma Talmadge was queen of America are now past forty, mostly prosperous, and very numerical. They are also inclined to indulgent self-appraisal, and the most interesting aspect of William Inge’s new play (The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Music Box Theater) is that it spends three acts not only tickling their affection for spit curls, fringed dresses and the Charleston, but, more subtly, flattering their superior “understanding” of all their once innocent class foibles, from anti-Semitism to fear of being frank about sex.
At one point, when the lonely but unquestionably upright young mother (she means well, but her husband is a traveling salesman) lolls on the living room rug and stretches out her arms toward her moody, already sissified son, I heard the lady next to me murmur with zestful satisfaction, “That boy’s going to have complexes …” A successful comedy scene is built around two girls earnestly discussing the pros and eons of dating a “Jewish boy.” There is heartily patronizing laughter when the vulgar, loud-talking aunt rants about the danger of Catholic movie stars, and a little later, when she weakly confesses that her husband has not touched her for three years, the audience savors its own capacity for looking boogies in the eye with an almost audible hush. Finally, there is an ending so patly wholesome that I expected to hear the player piano break into Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. In other words, William Inge has moved from the private world of moods and feelings, which gave his earlier plays their individual flavor, to a public world of modes and manners which ought to make his future plays as profitably sudsy as Rinso.
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