William Inge Theater Festival Honors Playwrights

THEATER PERFORMER (singing): New York, New York, a visitors' place, where no one lives on account of the pace, but seven millions are screaming for space, New York, New York...

JEFFREY BROWN: For one week a year, a small town in southeastern Kansas makes itself the center of the theater world.

THEATER PERFORMER: As for "New York, New York," it is still a hell of a town, but then so is Independence, Kansas.

THEATER PERFORMER: This is the life.

JEFFREY BROWN: The William Inge Theater Festival has plenty of drama...

THEATER PERFORMER: He died.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... and song...

THEATER PERFORMER: Maybe this time I'll be lucky...

JEFFREY BROWN: ... but most striking, at least at first, is just how completely unexpected it is.

When you think of American theater, Independence, Kansas might not be the first place that springs to mind. This is way off-Broadway. But here a small community and a big idea have come together to produce a 25-year-old hit, a festival that honors the nation's playwrights.

PETER ELLENSTEIN, Artistic Director, Inge Center for the Arts: It is odd. It's totally incongruous. It's something you would never expect to find in a small, rural, Kansas town.

JEFFREY BROWN: The key, says Los Angeles native, Peter Ellenstein, the festival's artistic director, is the mix of people and the focus on the writers.

PETER ELLENSTEIN: Playwrights are the smartest people in the American theater. They are the people who allow us, through their storytelling, to experience more what it is to be a human, and to grow, and to feel more sensitive, and finally to feel more alive.

JEFFREY BROWN: Many giants of the American stage have journeyed to Independence to celebrate and be celebrated: Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Wendy Wasserstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Greene.

THEATER PERFORMERS (singing): We will laugh out loud. We're so lucky to be we.

JEFFREY BROWN: Here their works are performed, their craft dissected and discussed by nationally known professionals and scholars, as well as local thespians and theater-goers.

TINA HOWE, Playwright: It was a big mistake. She didn't know how and she didn't...

JEFFREY BROWN: Last year's honoree was Tina Howe, who's won many awards but experienced nothing quite like this.

You are a lifelong New Yorker, right?

TINA HOWE: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: So what happened when you came here for the first time? What did you see?

TINA HOWE: I saw Oz. I thought I was going to see Kansas, but I saw Oz. When I walked down the street, people would say, "Are you with the Inge Festival? Are you a playwright? Are you a playwright?" And they would open their arms, and they would welcome me everywhere I went.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, this community of 10,000 first turned out to honor one of its own, William Inge, who was born in Independence in 1913. In a remarkably short period of the 1950s, Inge wrote four hit Broadway plays, "Come Back, Little Sheba" 1950, "Picnic," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was made into a hit film with William Holden and Kim Novak.

FILM ACTOR, "Picnic": Maybe a little town like this is the place to settle down, where people are easygoing and sincere.

JEFFREY BROWN: "Bus Stop" came in 1955, and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" in 1957.

RALPH VOSS, University of Alabama: Inge was the first one to write about people in small Midwestern towns and it came out in plays.

JEFFREY BROWN: University of Alabama Professor Ralph Voss is an Inge biographer.

RALPH VOSS: It just so happened that tastes on Broadway in the 1950s somehow were just right for stories about people who lived out in this part of the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: Inge also won an Oscar in 1961 for the screenplay to "Splendor in the Grass," which starred Natalie Wood and featured the debut of Warren Beatty.

But when tastes changed, Inge, who struggled with his homosexuality and later with alcoholism, fell out of favor and wrote a string of flops.

RALPH VOSS: It turned very quickly, because the 1960s ushered in a greater tolerance in terms of drama, the rise of the absurdists on stage, and a greater pushing of envelope on sexuality.

JEFFREY BROWN: Mired in depression, Inge took his own life in 1973. At the festival, scenes from Inge's plays are performed daily at his boyhood home by student theater groups.

THEATER PERFORMER: Where have you been?

THEATER PERFORMER: Why is your business where I've been? I've been in London to see the queen.

JEFFREY BROWN: In his former drawing room, the Midwest of the first half of the 20th century is brought to life.

JAMES STILL, Playwright: And the third scene is a scene between the brother and the sister...

JEFFREY BROWN: Playwright James Still, a winner of the festival's New Voices Award in 2000, says reading Inge for the first time as a young Kansan was a revelation.

JAMES STILL: Independence is a big town compared to the town I grew up in, but this guy wrote plays about people like my parents and people in my town. It was the first time I'd read anything that was like the world I lived in.

KEVIN WILLMOTT, Director: When you're writing a script, who do you write it for?

JEFFREY BROWN: Another Kansan, Kevin Willmott, decided not only to tell his region's stories, but to remain here. Willmott is an actor, writer and director of several films, most recently "The Confederate States of America."

KEVIN WILLMOTT: What I found here in Kansas is to stay here, remain here, and using the resources here to tell my story, and believing that the bigger world is going to get it, that they're going to -- you know, can connect it with, and you can sell it to them, and that they can understand it and appreciate it.

JEFFREY BROWN: None of what goes on at the festival works without the active involvement of the townspeople of Independence. It was a local theater teacher and friend of William Inge, Margaret Goheen, who started it all, and many of her students are volunteers to this day.

Leseley Simpson coordinates all daytime events at the festival.

LESELEY SIMPSON, Inge Festival Volunteer: A lot of the people here like cultural things. And if we volunteer to get it brought us to, you know, so be it. I mean, if that's what it takes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Local beer distributor Drew Demo has chauffeured many a-Broadway bigwig, including a memorable trip with Stephen Sondheim in 1998.

DREW DEMO, Inge Festival Volunteer: As we got into Kansas, we passed a field that had buffalo up against the fence. And we had to stop the car so he could see the buffalo up close and personal.

JEFFREY BROWN: He'd never seen a buffalo?

DREW DEMO: Never seen a buffalo before.

JEFFREY BROWN: Most events are held on the grounds of Independence Community College, which Inge attended in the 1930s. Students receive instruction from veteran performers in singing...

PERFORMING INSTRUCTOR: And you need to play a couple more levels than what you're doing right now.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... in the mechanics of acting...

PERFORMING INSTRUCTOR: It's got to mean everything in the world to you or else it won't mean anything to us.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... and advice on the unpredictable road toward making it.

PERFORMING INSTRUCTOR: A week later, I got on a plane, flew back to New York, and I finally had an agent. It took me four years.

JEFFREY BROWN: Such warnings are part of a healthy dose of reality dispensed to budding playwrights and actors at the festival from those who know. Colin Denby Swanson was a playwright in residence in Independence four years ago.

COLIN DENBY SWANSON, Playwright: If I get a signed rejection letter from a theater company, where someone's actually signed it in ink, I'm thrilled.

JEFFREY BROWN: You're thrilled to get the rejection letter, because they noticed?

COLIN DENBY SWANSON: I'm totally thrilled, yes. Well, they read the play.

JEFFREY BROWN: And since failure and rejection are facts of life in the arts, Peter Ellenstein says the theater's future may well depend on places like Independence Community College.

PETER ELLENSTEIN: The commercial theater has to succeed or fall on whether you have a hit, on whether the piece succeeds. But like scientific research, most art is about experimentation, and the majority of it doesn't entirely work.

JEFFREY BROWN: You have the ability to fail?

PETER ELLENSTEIN: We have the ability to fail; and, therefore, you can take chances.

JEFFREY BROWN: Independence, Kansas, has been taking chances now for 25 years. Instead of honoring one playwright, this year was a celebration of them all and of a unique event in a most unlikely center of the wide world of American theater.

THEATER PERFORMER (singing): ... it's a hell of a town!