William Inge's 'Natural Affection': No place like home for the holidays, but where's that?

 William Inge's breakout play, "Come Back, Little Sheba," was described in brief by the last mid-century's dean of theater critics, Brooks Atkinson, as "a bare, almost clinical character study" in his introduction to the widely circulated "New Voices in the American Theatre" (Modern Library).

Bernie and Donnie carry off Vince as Sue tries to calm Claire.

A key example of damning with faint praise, perhaps, but a clue as to the challenges and rewards of looking at the later Inge play that American Lives Theatre is currently presenting at IndyFringe. 

"Natural Affection" scrutinizes a mother-son relationship with authentic overtones of Freud's Oedipus complex. If "character study" perhaps highlights the limitations of this kind of theater, the phrase applies with such resonance to American lives in the country's often rootless big cities that the antiseptic constraints of "clinical" are shattered.

A failure in 1962, "Natural Affection" has long been highly regarded by ALT's artistic director, Chris Saunders, who indicates in a program note that he "can't believe this show is finally happening." What I saw capping the production's first weekend on Sunday afternoon substantiates the dream-come-true aura this drama has for its director. Happily, Saunders has assembled a cast of such pinpoint clarity in the way the performances cohere that the astonishing messiness of the action always stays in focus.

It's the kind of play in which every foreshadowing tells. Every hint of explosiveness has a cruelly followed path to detonation. The tightness of the main characters' mood swings, especially with overstressed low-rank executive Sue Barker seeking to firm up a distant relationship to her wayward son Donnie over the holidays, is unrelenting. 

Sue's links to her current significant other, the feckless car salesman Bernie Slovenk, blow hot and cold. His fragile self-esteem is erected on the 20th century's sexism, and when Bernie is faced with the young man's moving in with the couple in their small Chicago apartment with a dismal view, he becomes a lost partner in Sue's attenuated search for love. 

The challenge to the cast is not to make every speech and action carry a heavy load of prediction. Inge packed his drama closely, with a tidiness that only becomes evident over the whole two acts. Even the minor characters are crucial to each unwelcome revelation. Saunders has directed a cast capable of filling every moment believably without excessive signaling of the disasters to come.

In the role of Donnie, Zach Hoover exemplifies the consistency of this production's portrayals. When your eyes stray to him when he's not speaking, you are totally aware of how the scarred, errant Donnie is processing everything, keeping his demons at bay, clinging with mounting desperation to his mother's apparent good will, and warily assessing Bernie's threats to the relationship. Hoover's performance is seconded in commitment and intensity by Carrie Anne Schlatter's thorough investment as Sue (a role taken in two of the remaining performances through Feb. 4 by Christine Zavakos). 

Alex Oberheide's performance as Bernie carried the properly wearying notes of gusty bravado, masking a bitterness whose main effects are Sue's to bear. From the first scene on, the relationship accustoms the audience to notice that erotic attraction so often establishes itself on raw emotional neediness. It's a difficult alliance whose long-term prospects tend to be dim and slapdash.

That hangs in the air over the Brinkmans in the neighboring apartment, a couple portrayed in three caustic dimensions by Ronn Johnstone as Vince, a dangerous life-of-the-party type, and Diana O'Halloran as the lascivious but pretend-classy Claire. Vince has the play's one speech that could be taken as a set-piece enabling the playwright to cast aspersions at American life circa 1962. Johnstone brought it off well, but in context it's an outlier, given the play's almost hermetically sealed interactions.

Outside the five central roles, Inge brings in minor characters of crucial importance, played with an exact apprehension of their function by Wendy Brown, Tim Leonard, Garrett Rowe and Haley Glickman. Of the production team, the nuzzling, snuggling and canoodling are well-managed by intimacy director Jaddy Ciucci, and the outbursts of simmering violence by fight choreographer Scott Russell. 

Stephen Hollenbeck's costume designs are always apt, with deft approximations of aspirational taste when the main characters get into their ill-fated, puttin'-on-the-ritz mode. Aidan Sturgeon's sound design, including some original composition, writes the ticket for the play's era — the almost-forgotten post-war, pre-assassination period whose echoes reach fitfully into our own time. 

In this stunning production, "Natural Affection" suggests an even surer grip than history on perpetual issues unbound by time. Apart from recurrent holiday anxieties, they involve belonging, family ties, and finding a home where the inhabitants aren't gazing outside vainly seeking something better.

[Photo by Indy Ghost Light]