Last week marked the renewal of the Weboy's High Culture License. A trip to the theater, the symphony, and the movies - the former 2, at least, likely to elicit "oohs and aahs" from co-workers for their general imprimatur of "classy" - made me feel less like the world I'm in is a cultural wasteland.
The play was William Inge's Come Back Little Sheba, centered around th lead performance of S. Epatha Merkerson, a/k/a everybody's favorite senior police officer on Law and Order (I hadn't been counting, 
but she's been in that part for 16 years). Merkerson's casting in the role was interesting because the casting was basically colorblind, and added a layer of interracial relations to the proceedings.
Though I thought I knew the substance of the play - I think of it as part of the "neo realist" part of the fifties, where theater and TV especially tried to do dramas that captured the very everyday nature of some conflicts and problems - but really, I didn't. Merkerson plays Lola Delaney, a housewife married to a midwestern chiropractor, who, she reveals fairly early on, is a recovered alcoholic. Due to the state of their finances, they have needed to take in a boarder, a young woman named Marie, who is involved with a man back home, but is having a fling with the handsome sorts star who models for her art class. Doc, the recovering alcoholic, has taken a shine to Marie, and disapproves of her liaison. And it all falls apart, when Lola arranges a dinner for Marie and her soon to be fiance, and Doc disappears on a drunken binge, only to return in a nearly murderous, alcoholic rage.
One can see how the play was a revelation for its time - alcoholism was still not widely discussed at the time, and the role of Alcoholic's Anonymous even less so, and Inge works in a lot of AA material, including a general sense of hopefulness about recovery that's welcome. But he does it all with something of heavy hand, and though the actors tried heroically, the dated impressions of drunken binges and out of character behavior didn't entirely work - though it makes a nice counterpoint to the sweet, sad, poetic drunks of O'Neill and say, Tennessee Wlliams.
What did work was Merkerson, whose abilities and talents are rarely on display in L&O. In this play, she found the heart of Lola's character, the world of a codependant woman trying, as best she knows, to deal with a bewildering problem she can't really fix. It would be easy to make this a tale of being beaten down and hopeless, and Merkerson really refuses to wallow: this Lola is a woman who plays the hand she's dealt, as best she knows how. And it's all the more heartbreaking because her choices are so circumscribed. There's a moment in the second act where, surrounded by reminders of Doc's alcoholic rage, she literally finds herself unable to carry on, to even move. It's a stunning, revelatory moment, and Merkerson makes it entirely true.
The thing is, what worked in this production best were moments like that, in the silences. What was left unsaid, what went unexplored... these are the things that made this Come Back Little Sheba so affecting as drama. I suspect that wasn't always the case. I suspect that, back then, even the modest admissions shown here - of day-to-day coping with alcoholism and its aftermath, of knowing that young single "nice girls" could be sexually active before marriage, of the emotional problems that underpin marriage... must have seemed, in themselves, like a revelation. That's not the case now - our world has moved, we know more, we talk more about these things (though, arguably, we could stand to do more of it). It's the play that feels dated, slightly archaic, something of a throwback. that it has the power - as it did for me - to continue to move an audience, and catch us short, was a tribute to sensitive, thoughtful direction and talented, impressive actors. I'm glad I caught it; I'm sorry, since it closed this weekend, that you can't. But if someone has the brains to film it and bring it to TV or cable, try and catch it. Merkerson, and her costars, are wondrous. Especially in the silences.
I've just discovered your site (a link from TalkLeft I think), and have enjoyed it a lot. I am pleased to see this review having seen Sheba about a month ago. Couldn't agree more with everything you write here about it.
Posted by: Michael Rebain | March 18, 2008 at 01:59 PM