Singe and Burn

Nobody looks good in the morning. Yet, you can only stare at S. Epatha Merkerson as she rises from sleep as Manhattan Theatre Club’s inspiring revival of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba begins. On the upstairs level of James Noone’s set—the unkempt home that Merkerson’s character Lola shares with distant husband Doc (Kevin Anderson)—the actress is a study in true exhaustion, melancholy and loneliness. Director Michael Pressman’s production of Sheba, the first on Broadway since the 1950 original, doesn’t liberate Inge’s play from the ranks of period pieces. But its heart-stirring images deliver a suffocating intensity.

Gradually, Inge reveals Doc as a recovering alcoholic and Lola as the classic alcoholic’s wife—desperate to please, aching for peace and calm. Over the play’s tidy arc, it explains why Lola never matured beyond the coquetry of her youth, why Lola calls him “Daddy” with the idolization of a father’s little girl. It’s risky and audacious for Merkerson to show all of Lola’s arrested-development qualities so fast: Risky in that we fail to discover anything new in Lola later on, audacious in that we must watch Inge’s play, including its violent Act 2, through full comprehension of Lola’s wounded personal prison.

If this soft-spoken, flabby-armed, skittish slattern and this too-placid embracer of sobriety lived alone, Sheba would only concern a woman who pines after a dog that ran away. But Doc will lapse: Something in Anderson’s manner conveys its inevitability, and something must trigger it. Doc and Lola, to survive, must face their vanished youth, not to mention the ghost of the stillborn child that intertwined them together a quarter-century earlier.

Inge pulls the trigger twice. First it’s the couple’s ravishing boarder, a college girl named Marie, played by Zoe Kazan in a performance emitting total vitality. Kazan’s pert mouth and lithe figure symbolize quintessential female beauty—the kind that Lola reminds Doc she once possessed. No wonder Lola’s ardent flirtations with the hunky milkman (Matthew J. Williamson) have a clutching quality—it’s as if by not intentionally forgetting to check off for the milkman what kinds of cheese she wants, she’ll lose the attention that he isn’t really offering her anyway.

For her drawing class, Marie asks her boyfriend Turk, a college jock Adonis played by Brian J. Smith, to model. Turk’s stripped-down posing stirs something in Lola, to be sure, but his chiseled presence sends Doc reeling. Anderson’s acting is as brittle as Merkerson’s is bare: The moment we see Doc mulling a liquor bottle, to my amazement, sent gasps throughout the theater. Secretly, Lola reads a telegram for Marie. Her steady beau from home, Bruce, played by Chad Hoeppner with success scrawled across his face, is due to pay a visit. Lola’s frantic clean-up of the house and ambitious plans for dinner—subsequently ruined by Doc’s bender—is one of the most memorable extended scenes in all of mid-20th-century American playwriting. Exquisitely paced, executed in the naturalistic style most befitting Inge, it’s the capstone to Pressman’s cleanly staged production. If you don’t know the play or the 1952 film—for which the great actress Shirley Booth won a Tony and an Oscar, respectively—you’ll wonder what will become of Doc when his pent-up magma spews, and, more importantly, what Lola will do when facing more solitude and despair. Watch Merkerson’s face when Lola calls her mother. I’ve written nothing about this actress’s familiar role on Law & Order because her performance here is a beautifully textured creation. No telephone call ever ended with such a soul-crushing click.

Open run. Biltmore Theatre, 247 W. 47th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200. $46.50-91.50.