 We're here for a festival named in Islam. William Moderne was born here in the small southeastern Kansas community a little over a century ago, in 1913, and he grew up here. He became one of America's greatest players. Inge will always be remembered in America's literary and theatrical history because of five major works that have endured. They were all made first as plays produced in New York on Broadway, and then four or two out of three they were sold with the movies, and all the movies made from them were very successful movies. And that's how I had my first encounter with William Inge, a star creator in Lyons, Kansas, where I come back with a little sheba with playing and Shirley Booth and Bert Langcaster were starring in it. I didn't know then that Bert Langcaster was too young to play doc. I just thought Shirley Booth was kind of a mattering and bothersome in the role. But my point is that the movies made Inge accessible all over the country to folks who otherwise wouldn't have ever gone to New York to see a play on Broadway. Comeback Little Sheba was the first of his successful plays. It was in New York on Broadway in 1950, and then the movie also starring Shirley Booth, who had been in the role on Broadway. And that movie came out in 1952. The second play, second consecutive play to be a success, was Pignant. It was such a big success in New York that it won a Pulitzer Prize for William Inge. And it was made into a movie filmed near my hometown, Lyons, Kansas, in the middle of the state, back in the mid 50s, with exciting people like William Holden, Rosalyn Russell, and especially my young point of view, Kim Novak, some of the most important roles. That movie came to theaters in 1956. His third play in a row to be a success in New York was Bus Stop in 1955. It was filmed and starred Marilyn Monroe and John Murray, and that film came out in 1956. A fourth consecutive play that would be hit in New York, somewhat autobiographical play, set in a town that was supposedly in Oklahoma that sounded an awful lot like Southeast Kansas. That play was The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a success of On Broadway in 1957, and then made into another very successful film in 1960, starring Robert Preston and Dorian McGuire, and Eve Arden, and special and close to my heart, a hometown girl from Lyons, Kansas, and surely not, he went on to a very successful career in the nation. If that weren't enough, William Manage then wrote an original screenplay called Splendor in the Grass. The title and allusion to a wonderful poem, a long poem, by William Manage was called The Innovation Code. Nothing can bring back the hours of Splendor in the grass of Dorian. And the rest of that rhyme, but we will grieve not, rather find strength in that which remains behind. More or less the story of William Manage's life, accepting what had happened in his life and in his career, the ups and downs of him, who he was, from where he was, but those five words cemented his reputation. And if all that weren't enough, he won an Academy Award in 1961 for the best original screenplay. So the answer to my question, how many small Kansas towns can claim the mating son who created five enduring major works, who won a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award? So William Manage is important in the cultural history of America because he has the reputation, richly deserved, of being America's first authentic Midwestern playwright. And because he won that Pulitzer Prize and that Academy Award. And because his plays became popular films, directed by some of America's most famous stage and screen directors, and starring some of America's most famous stage and screen actors and actresses. Now, biographical information, inch broody young adulthood here in independence, attending independent public school, he acted in local high school productions, directed by Anna Engelman, a dedicated theater teacher who is famous in the annals of this community. He aspired to a career in acting, a pursuit he continued at the University of Kansas after he graduated from independent high school in 1930. Except for a brief time attending independence community college, he returned to KU University of Kansas where he graduated in 1935. He earned a master's degree from George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1938. He decided against trying an acting career briefly taught high school in Columbus, Kansas. One of the interesting things about the inch collection here is they have a copy of his original teaching contract signed for the year he taught high school in Columbus, Kansas. I think any salary was $1,500 was 1936-37 through year. He taught at Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then after a brief stint as a cultural critic at the St. Louis Star Times newspaper, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis. Engelman didn't enjoy teaching. He always claimed that he was not very good at it, but there's some evidence from people who were in students that they thought otherwise, but that was not what he wanted to do. He was a little bit at loose end. He had a bit of a drinking problem, but when he was the cultural critic for the paper in St. Louis, he was advised that there was a young playwright coming to town who was going to have his play, his first play, mounted soon in Chicago, where it would be a success. It would go on in New York, and he was visiting in St. Louis to see his mom. His name was Thomas Lanier William, better known now as Tennessee. We managed interview to do a kind of hometown boy has play coming out, you know, and they became good friends. Enged travel to Chicago, saw the glass and imagery, which was that first play that was waiting. We were absolutely down. And he confessed to his friend afterwards, said, you know, I see so many plays here in St. Louis, and I really don't think they're all they do. I think I could write a better play than what I just saw. And Tennessee Williams said, well, why don't you write play? And so we decided he would. Now, if you know Tennessee Williams, it's the glass and the azure, you know that it's really about the Williams fan. Well, William and his first play was called Farther Off from Heaven. And oddly enough, it was about the inch fan of the independent panel. And it was produced down in Dallas, Texas in 1947. Through Tennessee Williams and that friendship inch developed theater contacts in New York and in Dallas, where Margo Jones was mounting a brand new regional theater. And those contacts became very important. He also was put into a business relationship with the woman who was Tennessee Williams' agent in New York City, Audrey Woods, who later became a very famous agent and was one of the founders of international creative management, which I see and which was later to be a huge kind of conglomerate agency. But Inge had a really good agent in New York. So you can imagine his disappointment when that really good agent in New York that she didn't think that first play, Farther Off from Heaven, was really what she could sell to potential producers. Inge was heartbroken about this. He really hated the idea of going back to teaching. And so he was sort of despondent. But he started working with an idea he had about this couple that he more or less was thinking about a disappointing marriage to disillusioned people, but they make their lives together work sometimes by the very thing. And that's what became Comeback Little Sheba. He showed it to Williams, Williams likes it. And so he encouraged him send this one to New York to Audrey Woods. And that was Comeback Little Sheba. That was the first of them. Once he was successful, and Farther Off, those four consecutive Broadway hits, fame and fortune came to reason. And it reflected very favorably on his hometown in the Midwest. He brought a subject matter to Broadway that wasn't really familiar to the theater going public and critics at that time. They got a real slice of life in the Midwest 1950s style. And that really established a kind of new subject matter of great interest in American theater. And all of those plays that I mentioned are still produced that over a half century past well over half. I have a personal theory that picnic has been produced in every city of America, large and small, that have a community theater group. It's an ensemble cast. Generally, the sexuality is muted. Even in some productions, how one of the main characters keeps his shirt on some communities. But a couple of years ago, there was a revival in New York. And how definitely he had his shirt off. So we are talking about work. It's a little unfortunate, because Ian was not a particularly happy fulfill feeling person when he had all his famous success. Pulitzer Prize, sold the rights to the movies. He should have been deliriously happy. But when he published his collection, before played by William Ann, he wrote a preface in which he said, I just had always thought as a young man that success would make me deliriously happy. But it didn't particularly. And there are very, very compelling reasons why that is true. One of those reasons, not talked about much in the 1950s, but more familiar to us today, it ended with homosexuality. It wasn't just considered immoral and it was illegal. And a lot of very, very creative people, while their artistic talent may have flourished and brought in great success, there was a personal sense of who they were and why they were the way they were and so on, was not satisfied. Ian did go into psychoanalysis, struggled with his alcoholism. He was a man who was somewhat troubled by all of this. And it was reflected in the way he lived his life. He was publicly well known, but he was a very private person. And that was a contributing factor to the way he experienced his own success. But as I said, he had all of those successes. That's why we have the festival. And it's a part of the story is the acceptance of this community of its native son. There may have been some hesitancy, some people who saw, say, a play like Picnic in which the town's young beauty queen runs off with the drifter, the shiftless, the handsome guy coming to town. That didn't speak well somehow for the community. There were those who knew about India's private life and so they felt that they couldn't approve his word because they couldn't approve him and the way he lived his life. What they probably didn't know and appreciate was how tortured he often felt about this situation. Nonetheless, the fact that he was successful gave him something to hold on to, that no matter what his personal life was like, he was validated by that success. People did like what he wrote. People cared about what he was able to produce and give to the world and that sustained him and made him stronger and he'll be continued as a writer. Unfortunately, time and tastes change. Critics who used to love your work decide that you're not doing good work anymore and Inge ran into that. It was like a buzz saw. Williams, his friend ran into it too. The problem was, well, you know, when you set a high standard for yourself, people expect you to do the same thing every time out. Right before hit plays in a row. People start asking you, where's number five? Tennessee Williams was constantly being held as you don't stand. He had a wonderful play called Summer in Smoke. When it went to Broadway, Streetcar named Zara was still on down the street. So when Summer in Smoke appeared, the critics said, well, it's too much like Streetcar. He's not doing anything new. And yet, if you know Summer in Smoke, you know it's a wonderful play. So sometimes you can be like the critics have to say something. So they decide, well, it's good, but it's modest. And then Inge got that from the critics. Unfortunately, after the success was putting her in the grass, Inge's career pretty much went off track. Not so much because he didn't have anything more to say, but because audiences and critics decided that they didn't particularly like any more of Inge's plays about people from Kansas and Oklahoma. He did movie scripts, one of which I think was very good. It was an adaptation of James Bleo's novel All Fall Down in 1962. Well done film, not very successful. Then he worked, he took a one-act play that he had called Bust Wiley's Back in Town, worked it up into a screenplay. It was made as a film. He was not consulted with changing because, you know, if you're out in Hollywood and you're a writer, you're the last person that they asked once you produce the script. He didn't recognize the movie that resulted from his script. So he had his name taken off the credits. That's how bad it was in terms of how he thought that movie should have been made, what that story should have been. So if you look at one of these movie posters that's here in the collection, they were donated by Art McClure, who's a district professor over at Central Missouri State, over in Hornsburg, Missouri. You'll see for the poster on Bust Wiley's Back in Town that the screenplay is credited to a man named Walter Gage. There was never any such person. That's because he had his name taken off of. So he was disappointed and he was sort of like in a box that he couldn't write his way out of. He had three more plays on Broadway, A Lost of Roses in 1959, Natural Affection in 1963, and Where's Daddy in 1966. None of these plays attracted audiences. Critics were very rough on. In fact, one critic rose after seeing Where's Daddy that, I don't care where daddy is, I want to know where William Inge is. He's a sort of gratuitous and unnecessary, very cunning kind of commentator. Inge's lack of success led him to the bearer of immigration, drug abuse. He did write two novels near the end of his career. One of them was called Good Luck, Miss Wycoff, about a lonely school teacher in a small Kansas town that he called Freedom. Get it? Freedom. Not independence. Freedom. That story is an attempt to be sensational largely not very successful. That was published in 1970. In 1971 he published a memoir, a fiction, but he called it a memoir of a young, once young writer named Joey Hansen, who had a career mostly as a school teacher and wrote some poetry that had some success, but in the long run and in the short, just either way, didn't feel like his life had been very successful. It's a very touching book and I was assured by members of the Inge family that it's pretty much an autobiographical novel, very thinly disguised as a memoir of someone else. Also set in freedom again. I would urge of those two novels that you read by some of these writers, very touching. I would call it the autobiography of Inge's creative sensibility. He was in and out of hospital the last few days of his life, checked in and then checked himself out against medical advice and he took his own life when he was only 60 years old on June 10, 1973. He's buried here in Independence. In the Inge family plot, this personalized tombstone adds to his name the single additional work label. For those of you who would like to read a very short summary and not read this long, Art McClure of Central Missouri, who gave us these moving posters, has written a short piece called The Midwestern World Revenge and copies are ready and available around the town and it gives you a thumbnail kind of sketch of his life and his contribution. I'll tell you a little bit about this collection and my work. The collection itself began in 1965 when Inge donated some of his own manuscript. Now it isn't that he necessarily wanted to enshrine himself in his hometown. It's more like as I understood it in some family he was always very keen to find ways to write off taxes and so he would put a value on the manuscript and then write it off after he donated it. By the way, he also was quite a collector of modern art, sculpture and painting. He owned Pollock. He owned paintings by Pollock before Pollock was Pollock. So they appreciated very sharply and he donated those to museum about that tax right off. But what is the end result of that is that the Nelson, for example, in Kansas City has some of his art collections. He was a very astute collector of modern sculpture and he had very fine take. So when he started the Inge collection by donating manuscript, I'm sure in 1965 he didn't quite realize how it would grow and how astonishingly if he could know today that there is a festival in this town named after him and honoring him. He would be he would be very pleased and he would also be I think a stricken with a kind of sense of wonder with such a thing that happened. Now over the years material came into the collection from several other sources including his agency, ICM. Professor McClure of Central Missouri State donating movie poster. Inge family members have donated manuscripts and works of modern art. Collectors of Inge's letters donated some of these letters. There are also many photographs. Some of the photographs are in this display case by Paloma here. I invite you to look at in my presentation pictures of Inge as a young man, copies of manuscripts, drawings that he made, a copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof signed by his friend Tennessee Wade. These are in addition receiving bookcases. The sister Helene gave his book collection to Inge Collection and it's all a little over 1600s. If you look at these fine you'll see what a well-read man he was and his interests ranged. I noticed just over here at the sampling you've got Plato, great philosopher. Over here you've got murder mysteries, John Toland, Dillinger Day, a very touching what I thought was a very touching spine, the sexual offender and his offense. Right beside the Dalton Brothers, the famous outlaws, over here books on religion, mysticism, production books of dark at the top of the stairs, one of the play, In the Cold Blood by Truman Capote, another one of my interests. There are over a hundred manuscripts that came in to go with the 400 manuscripts that were already here, record collection, critical and biographical sources, films that were made from his work, and great many audio tapes of interviews with people who knew Inge were very very helpful to me when I worked on my biography. There are a couple of audio tapes that feature Inge's voice, his own voice, he had a very deep rich kind of baritone and he was quite a good reader of his own play. In 1983 I had a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to come here and study this collection. It was just being cataloged at the time I was working on it. I was right at this table, sitting on the end there, Bill Fonesteele, who was assisting Gene DeGrooson from Pittsburgh State University to curate, opened the boxes of things, cataloged them, and it was lucky that I was here at that time because Gene, Mr. Fonesteele would give me things that they found in a box that they thought I'd really be interested in and I'll have a little bit more to add about that shortly. But the memorabilia that's here about the Inge family and Inge's interest is record collection. We love to listen to classical music. All testimony to someone who was born and raised here, forged his artistic sensibilities here and who went on to become a very, very successful creative artist in his own right, but also a very well-read, very intelligent, and very, very insightful human being. It gave all of us something lasting in his creation. William Inge's dad was a traveling salesman. One of the things he had in common with Fonesteele, they must have swapped some interesting notes about their traveling sales in Boston. One of the more interesting things here in the Inge collection is over in the corner there's real badly battered old sample cases. His father worked for the Wheeler and Potter dry goods company out of St. Louis and in fact that's why William Inge's middle name is Potter, one of his dead bosses. This sample case belongs to Luthor Clayton Inge's father and he dragged it all over the Indian territory, which is what you and I know selling Wheeler and Potter dry goods. Also here in the collection, these movie posters, which I love because this is the way I first found out about William Inge. When I heard that the guy who wrote Kittnet was from Kansas, I got very proud because I'm from Kansas. In fact, I graduated from high school at a place called Plainville, and people tell me they don't believe that. They think I made it up. It's just too appropriate. But it's the truth. Come back little Sheba, Kittnet, which was filmed near as I said, my hometown. Here are William Holden and Kim Novak dancing in Halstead, Kansas, where they have in their local town museum the kind of paper mache swan boat that that large Kim Novak comes floating down the local town creek. This is a picture of several people at the picnic shot by the Selene River in the park in Solana, Kansas. And that's interesting in a way because in the movie of Kittnet, there really is a picnic. In the play picnic, there is no picnic. It's off stage. And everything happens in the backyard single set that was designed by Joe Milesner. By the way, Joe Milesner was one of the most important set designers in the history of American theater. He did set Scranton's play. The movie version of Bus Stop, How Can You Miss Marilyn Monroe? I assure you that in the mid 50s, I didn't miss it. With Don Murray, directed by Joshua Logan, who by the way also directed picnic. And Ingin Logan did not get along very well. So by the time the movie was made, you've never seen the movie of Bus Stop, it's not set in Kansas. It's set in their zone. And the one character who has a lot in common with William M. in, Dr. Lyman, the itinerant drunken professor who's just riding a bus, does not appear in the movie at all. But it was a big cinemascope, a blended movie, particularly if you were not familiar with the play. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which features a young little boy who collects movie pictures of movie stars. Sunny Flood is very much like William M. was when he was a young boy growing up here. That's interesting. The French movie published in For Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Here's Splendor in the Grass with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, by the way. That was Warren Beatty's first film, directed by Ilya Khadam. Warren Beatty's first role on Broadway was in William M. in the Lost of Roads in 1959. And Inge urged Ilya Khadam to cast Warren Beatty as Bud Stamper in Splendor in the Grass. He worked out very well for Inge, for Ilya Khadam, and especially well for one day. There was a fairly forgettable movie called The Stripper starring Joanne Woodward that was based on The Lost of Roads. Pretty much a forgettable movie. And there's a poster for All Fall Down, which I, as I said, I think is a pretty good film. Now I just want to call your attention, and this is the part where I move around a little bit. There are several pictures of Inge himself on the walls. And this is one of the standard ones that's been used a lot with the programs for this festival. An example of Inge's art that he collected. Over here on the wall, the Peabody Reflector is the alumni magazine of Peabody College in Nashville. And Playwright Bill End was featured in the March and April 1956 edition. What I want to point out here, I think it's very one of the great things in the collection, the trustees of Columbia University in the city of New York, award William Inge the Poeture Prize. Notice framed here. Walk behind these ladies here, the pictures of William Inge as a young man, beginning with a baby picture in the upper left, and then at the bottom right, and immediately to the left of it, high school picture. As you can see with a very handsome young man, nice head of hair. I remember hair. Inge loved to sketch. He had some artistic ability of his own. When he was a younger man, he sketched some of the movie stars that he most admired. And if you look over here at this display, you see some performers who are probably not all known to young people today, but they were very popular when Inge was a young man. Is that Basil Rathbone? That is Basil Rathbone and Tallulah Bankhead to the left, Joan Crawford down in the lower right corner, Agnes Moorhead upper left. I'm not sure about the other two. But you see he had a real gift, but he just didn't pursue that. You also see in this one drawing that he might have had sort of inflammation toward modern art, because that looks a little more like Picasso. The catalog, the old fashioned card catalog over here lists all of the holdings of the collection. When I got that NEH grant and spent a month here in Independence, this was my center of operation. I went out into the community and I did interview some local folks, many of them who at that time in the early 80s were contemporaries. So they knew William Inge and they had stories to tell about him growing up here. Mostly interesting stories, like one of his neighbors, a woman named Helen Clement, who said, you know, we lived about a walk away from the Inges and they lived over here in the house that you didn't see the print up there that went over on 4th Street and she said every day he would walk to and from the school and he was so earnest. He was just going to school and she remembered that very indelibly. Her husband John Clement remembered that they had one of these apparently it was done a lot back then. Young men would dress up like women and they would sort of do a mock chorus line presentation. John Clement was like the quarterback on the football team but he was a part of one of those burlesque groups and there's a picture of them all over here in this tape of all the young men and they're striking this pose and it's hilarious. I mentioned a while ago that I had a lot of helping spotting things that were here and some of these things that were brought to my attention touched me very much because I was getting to know who this man was and I knew for example how important his mother was in his whole life and I'm sure that his mother was very proud of but he didn't come back to visit very much but he would always write this sort of like non-committal not very deep and warm letter and this is a letter that he wrote to his mother well I call it a letter it's one paragraph it's dated saturday november 14th it must have been shortly after the sale of the film rights because this is what he wrote dear mom just got your nice letter sorry not to have written soon no I haven't been sick or anything I've been busy and maybe just careless about writing but I think of you just the same yes I sold picnic to the movies for a nice big sum of money doesn't that make you happy the money will be paid to me over a period of years and I'll get a little at the time you take care of yourself now like a good girl and I'll be home to see you as soon as I can I defy you to find anything of much meaning there except that maybe he's letting mom know he doesn't have a whole lot of extra money here when you look at this you'll see that if something's been cut at an odd angle out of the bottom of the session and I have a secret suspicion that his sister Helene or someone close to him flipped that because there was something hand-written there if you didn't want public I don't want to say anything bad about Helene his sister because she was very helpful to me if you see this very nice display out here in the hallway that they made I think the creator right back there in the corner that reflects a lot of my work you'll know that you'll see some of the health that Helene called did give me but she was protective of her brother and she did not want it widely known that he was gay until other people were saying and it became better known but you know there was this attitude and protective feeling that she had she loved her brother very much but sadly she's the one who was living with him in the last day when she found him then it was good but there is that and I think probably the thing that touched me the most was when I was here doing my research Bill Bonnstein brought me the letter one day and said I know you're going to want to look at this. Margaret Goheen who was one of the founders of this festival and a man named Neil Edge who at the time was the president of the independence community had written to him and said we're building a new campus and we're going to have a theater we'd like to know that it's all right with you if we named it the William Edge Theater the letter that Bill Bonnstein brought me was in just a reply which if you'll bear with me I want to read to you you have bestowed an honor upon me I never could have expected it is very warming to know that my home town's people thinking up of me if you want to name your theater center for me it's certainly an honor but also a responsibility which I feel I must consider carefully not a respect for you rather than for myself I am after all only 55 years old old enough but young for some reason and I may have my most important work yet before me important I can't help wondering what the civic feeling would be should I write a play or a novel that the town's people strongly disapprove about and what if something should happen in my personal life that would make my name and embarrass me with a call to me please understand I'm not planning on any of these things happening but one never knows usually buildings are named after people after their death I've always considered this custom to be a useless one and I've always argued that we as a nation should pay more honor to artists and writers when they're living now I see the hazard of the practice dead people want much safer to honor he knew what the people in town might have thought he wrote certain things they were performed and published that might reflect very negatively not only on him but on this community and he did not want that to happen because at the bottom of everything we know you can't write you can't write about a place without learning the way you did it any questions thank you so much sure my friend is not familiar with any of this and I know she's internalizing it and you are indeed the person to talk about you well I don't get tired of it you can see I get a little emotional well that's part of the well that's very kind of you goodness gracious there's so much more to know about where you're in but it's the best way is to read the old spot or go down and rent a movie because they're not bad movies even bus stop without uh professor lineman is very entertaining there was a group of american writers fiction writers back mostly in the 1920s and they wrote about small towns in the midwest and they were very successful but none of them was a playwright i'm talking about writers like sherwood anderson the onesburg ohio is a classic work in american literature and the man from salt center minnesota which is even smaller than independent sinclair Lewis who wrote mainstream they are the important writers that inch has a kinship with taken as a group these writers one of whom by the way presenter watson howl and were called the writers of the revolt from the village and there were there were poets too like edgard lee master uh was born in garnet kansas but wrote about uh a little town boon river anthology you know in the state of illinois these revolts from the village people all had a village background and they all had to go to the metropolitan areas and think about their roots but they wrote very compelling another such writer with willa capper who spent four many years in tiny red cloud nebraska which is also smaller than independent they are writers worth knowing and they have a strong literary contribution to the history of literary art in in america inch had a lot of success in the theater world productions of his play if you read those play as literature like much like we often read Shakespeare instead of Shakespeare you'll really learn something about small town their values and the people in them that like i say you can't produce that kind of work might go off to the city and you might run the risk of upsetting some of the local folks that you're going to tell the truth about how that experience registered on your sensibility women certainly feels that way and he's the only playwright that is done the others are itching right i guess i'm through there are no questions but i'm going to be around here from the duration of the festival and i'll be here against sunday afternoon so if you're thinking something you want to ask me or talk to me about i'm going to be around i'd love to talk to you thank you and if anybody's interested we do have um coffee and tea and hot chocolate it's very interesting i had to clean this place i used to work in the library here and cleaning all of the books and everything it's very interesting wow you're very well done