Come Back, Little Sheba (play)

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This article is about the play. For the other uses, see Come Back, Little Sheba (disambiguation).

Four Plays (Random House, 1958) collected Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.

Come Back, Little Sheba is a play written by American playwright William Inge while he was a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis in 1946–1949.

Presented by the Theatre Guild and directed by Daniel Mann, the play premiered at the Booth Theatre February 15, 1950, and ran for 190 performances. Sidney Blackmer and Shirley Booth both won Tony Awards for their performances. The "little Sheba" of the title is a lost dog, who does not appear onstage.

Reviewing a 1984 revival for Time, William A. Henry III wrote:

Last week the Roundabout Theater in New York City mounted a powerful Come Back, Little Sheba, the first major Manhattan production since its premiere... Like all of Inge's best plays, Sheba is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere. An alcoholic chiropractor (Philip Bosco) and his slatternly wife (Shirley Knight) live in a dreary house in the Midwest, diverted from maudlin introspection only by their boarder, a sprightly college student (Mia Dillon). Doom seeps through every dusty curtain. Although the husband is supposedly recovered, it is apparent that he is looking for an excuse to take a drink. Although the college girl is beloved as a surrogate for the couple's baby daughter who died 20 years before, it is evident that she will, however inadvertently, add to the wreckage of the marriage. The title refers to the wife's calling for a lost puppy, yet it is clear that hers is in truth a cri de coeur for the unassuageable pain of growing old before she has even grown up. If this is the heartland, it is as seen by Freud: the husband lusts after the girl and fantasizes about her as the virtuous virgin that his wife was not; the wife acts kittenish even with the milkman; the girl selects lovers, then discards them. Middle age is portrayed as a time of aching sexual frustration, made more acute by the close-at-hand vision of youth... Inge did not transform his characters: they end where they began. But he understood them. In their interplay was genuine life, often blunted but ever resilient. ^[1]

Reprising her Broadway role, Shirley Booth starred with Burt Lancaster in a 1952 film adaptation which brought Booth an Academy Award for her performance. A 1977 television version, starring Laurence Olivier, Joanne Woodward and Carrie Fisher, was directed by Silvio Narizzano.

Inge's play was adapted into a musical, Sheba (1974), by Clint Ballard Jr. (music) and Lee Goldsmith (book and lyrics). In the 1974 Chicago production, Kaye Ballard took the role of Lola, and Donna McKechnie starred in the 2001 production in Westport, Connecticut.