THEATRE + COMEDY

The Country Playhouse (voted through Houston Community Newspapers as Best Community Theatre of 2010) is proud to present a revival of William Inge’s powerful play, Come Back, Little Sheba. Directed by Jack Dunlop, it will run from April 22 to May 7, 2011 on the Cerwinske Stage.

Come Back, Little Sheba is set in the 1950s at the Midwestern home of Lola and Doc Delaney. Twenty years earlier Doc was an aspiring medical doctor but Lola’s pregnancy, a shotgun wedding and the subsequent loss of their child forced him to give up his career and precipitated his decline into alcoholism. Doc is now a recovering alcoholic and Lola is an overweight, middle-aged flirt.

The play centers on the further disruption of their lives by the presence of their boarder, art student Marie, and her lusty approach to life and to her two lovers – one in town and one not. Lola strongly identifies with Marie while Doc sees her as representing his youth and the sacrifices he made. The title of the play refers to Lola’s missing puppy, lost when she was a girl.

When this play was written, pregnancy outside wedlock was a controversial subject not discussed and not usually portrayed in drama, families went to great lengths to cover up such a scandal. In the 1950s most people drank and addiction to alcohol was not generally recognized as a problem, membership in Alcoholics Anonymous was certainly not a topic for conversation.

Over the years since the debut of Come Back, Little Sheba, the play has become one of William Inge’s most popular works and is generally considered a pioneering masterpiece in the domestic drama genre. It was one of the first to address broken dreams, alcoholism and failed relationships successfully – topics now routinely portrayed on stage, screen and television – and it remains the prototype for contemporary social theater.