A couple of weekends ago was the 43rd annual William Inge Theatre Festival. Every year this festival remembers the legacy of William Inge and honors a living playwright with the Distinguished Achievement In American Theatre Award. This year we honored Qui Nguyen. 

This year I was asked to give a lecture on William Inge. I’m not an Inge scholar or a historian so I chose to share about Inge’s legacy and why I think that legacy still matters today.

Here is a portion of the lecture I gave:

I didn’t grow up hearing about William Inge or knowing his work. But I did grow up in a rural community without a lot of access to the arts. I grew up not seeing myself represented on television and not knowing how to articulate what that lack of representation meant. It’s a shame I didn’t learn about Inge earlier because he would have made me feel less alone. 

I’m glad to be with you today, thinking out loud about Inge’s legacy and the ways his work still speaks today. I’m delivering this Inge lecture not as an Inge scholar or a researcher. Not as a historian, but as a working playwright who believes in the Inge legacy. 

As I said, I grew up in a rural community without a lot of access to the arts. The plays I saw were mostly whatever my older relatives were in at their Christian high school. So when I went off to college with the intent to study theatre but I didn’t really know what I was getting into. My college was small and so we were doing shows like Arsenic and Old Lace, Brigadoon, Music Man, and Agatha Christie plays. As a gender nonconforming young person (who didn’t understand at the time my sexuality or my gender identity) I found there was no place for me in these plays, even though I had talent. So I started to write in order to create a space for myself to exist on stage.

It wasn’t until after college that I started to fill in my education a little bit more, seeing shows on Broadway, reading some Shakespeare, starting to read other plays. But still, I didn’t hear anything about William Inge. 

Honestly, it wasn’t until I received a phone call asking me to be a playwright in residence at the Inge House in the summer of 2021 that I even knew of Inge and his work. I said yes and promptly bought the biography by Ralph Voss and the collection of four plays. 

I spent my six weeks at the Inge house reading the biography and Inge’s plays. It was such an interesting experience to read Dark at the Top of the Stairs, while experiencing the dark stairs on my way to bed each night. To read Picnic sitting on the porch where porches are featured heavily. To read about Inge’s family while also reading Come Back Little Sheba. To sit at places like Ane Mae’s and Turbos while reading Bus Stop. 

And reading about his life while sitting in the house where parts of it happened. To imagine his parents fighting, and his siblings squabbling. Picturing him dressed as a little old lady and turning the backyard into a theatre and making the neighborhood come to see his plays. I began to feel as if I knew him. 

Partly because there was so much of his story that I saw myself in: a childhood discomfort with gender, a fear of sexuality (my own and others and what all of it might mean), the desire to tell stories, and the entrepreneurial spirit of making do with not a lot. I too, as a child, put on shows and forced my parents to pay a nickel to see me sing into a stand up vacuum as a microphone. I, too, wrote short stories and made books, and lived in a world of my own imagination. I, too, wondered if there was a place for me in my rural home town while also worrying I wouldn’t be able to make it anywhere else. 

And in spending those six weeks here, I also felt a calling to come back to my rural roots. It was the community here and the legacy of Inge that caused my wife and I to uproot the lives we were living in Minneapolis and move, just nine months later, to Independence and make our how and our artistic community here. 

So who was William Inge? Why did I become so captivated by him and his work? And why are we still talking about him all of these years later?

I think it’s helpful to not assume knowledge, so here’s a brief history of Inge. He was born in 1913 in Independence, KS and died in Los Angeles, CA in 1973 at the age of 60. 

He was obsessed with stories as a kid. As an adult he had a string of hits, opening five shows on Broadway and being nominated for and winning scores of awards. 

But his letters and other writings reveal how much he struggled with belief in his own work and with the demands of collaborators (like directors) in making his work “Broadway ready”. 

Inge was gay, though not publicly. It doesn’t seem that he had any long term relationships and from reading his work his relationship with sexuality in general seems strained and complicated. 

Inge also seemed to struggle with both a longing for his hometown and a desire to run away from it and never look back. He wrote often about wanting to return to Kansas, but he never did. He purchased land at some point and didn’t do anything with it. One has the sense that he wasn’t sure where he fit. He wasn’t sure if the places he loved could manage to love him back.

William Inge died by suicide in the home he shared with his sister. I think sometimes we don’t talk enough about his death and the forces that led up to it. 

Inge kept on writing, but as culture changed it seemed to pass him by. It seemed as if no one wanted stories of women from the midwest, of small towns with quaint traditions, of the quieter longings of young people trying to find their place in the world. He tried to adapt; he wrote about cities and sex and violence. He wrote more about men, he started to have some gay characters in his work, but it seemed that people didn’t take this new work seriously. Whether it was because Inge’s heart wasn’t fully in it, or the zeitgeist had moved on, or some combination of a lot of factors, the work struggled to find an audience and the rejection hit Inge hard. 

He identified himself with his work. If it failed, he failed. Add on to that his loneliness, his depression, and his drinking and you have a toxic combination. 

Inge died by suicide in the home he shared with his sister. It seems that a lot of people were not entirely surprised by this. And yet, they were also deeply affected. 

His teacher, Margaret Goheen, was one of those impacted. She was instrumental in starting this festival to remember Inge and honor his work, but also to honor living playwrights. Someone told me that her reasoning was that playwrights needed to know, while they are alive, what their work means. It makes me choke up every time I think about it. This desire to save playwrights Inge’s fate. It’s one of the things that drew me to this community: this legacy of honoring. 
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And I think it’s important that we honor Inge as a gay man. That we honor him not in spite of that but because of it. 

In a time when so many queer and trans people are under attack. In a state that just recently passed a draconian bill targeting identification documents and the right to use the restroom in peace and safety for transgender people. In a moment when we can’t even host the playwright in residence program anymore because the National Endowment for the Arts took back the funding they had granted the college, it’s important that we name, clearly, that Inge was gay. And that we understand that his ability to write the characters he wrote with such nuance and depth was because of his queerness. Because queer and trans people know how to observe. We understand what it’s like to be outsiders. We’ve felt, deeply, what it’s like to be not wanted. To live in and love places that don’t seem to love us back. So many of us have fled the places that made us in search for places where we can live and love with just a little less fear. 

And it’s so important that we not only make space for artists of marginalized identities to make work, but that we hear and honor that work. That we don’t expect that work to conform, but we allow it to breathe and be what it is. 

Inge helped people to feel seen even as he, himself, didn’t feel seen. He created representation that mattered, and that pushed people to consider that those in middle America had voices and dreams and stories that mattered. 

In a time when so many people feel unseen and unheard, when the stories of rural America continue to get passed over, Inge reminds us that our stories matter. 

And here’s something I think is important to name: queer and trans people, people of color, women; we, too, live in rural America. We, too, choose to make our homes here. We, too, are rooted in these places. 

When I moved to Independence I did so with intention. With the intention to make art here, with the intention to reflect my own rural upbringing in my work while also being unashamedly queer and trans. My rural identity and my trans identity inform and influence one another. I was made in a rural space and my sense of self stems from that rural upbringing. And yet, at the same time, I feel the tension of being here, especially now. I sometimes worry for my safety. I wonder if I am wanted and if I am not wanted what will happen to me. But I still feel like I want this to be my home. I still feel like the stories that exist in places like this one matter. That there is something here that is so precious and special and instructive for people in other places. 

And as I make art that centers trans people from rural communities, I also sense the same frustration that Inge felt. That my work is unimportant, that theatres don’t want it, that when theatres take a chance on it my work isn’t understood or fully appreciated because it speaks of an experience that not many people share (or value). I have often wondered if my work doesn’t get produced more often because theatres don’t want to put in the work to appropriately cast it. And I have been on the receiving end of feedback and reviews that were much more about the person giving them than they were about the work they saw. 

The difference between Inge and I is that I have a supportive community around me. I am able to write mostly openly and know that I have creative collaborators and supportive people who embrace my identity. That is something Inge didn’t have; or at least didn’t feel he had. And then on top of that to feel the world was passing him by, that the time for his stories was over; to be a man who so identified himself with his work, this rejection felt catastrophic. 

What happened to Inge is still happening today; certain stories being prioritized and others being pushed aside. Or tokenized. And this, to be clear, is not an argument for prioritizing one set of stories over another, but is instead a plea to expand the canon. To make space for MORE stories, not less. 

Because the beauty of art when done truthfully and with love, is that it helps us to see one another better. It helps us to understand one another better. For some of us it helps us to know we are not alone in the world, that there is hope and a future for us. For others it helps us to understand our neighbors better, to understand the struggles of other people better. This is a good thing. This helps us to be better to one another and in this time, being better to one another makes a huge difference. 

Inge’s work still speaks to audiences today. His understanding of people, his own anxieties, his love for the people of the places he came from, still resonate. New audiences are continually finding Inge and his work is being kept alive by high schools and colleges, by this festival, and by people’s commitment to remembering him and his work.

And yet, the work of the festival isn’t just about Inge. It’s about inspiring and uplifting a new generation of playwrights who tell stories that we need to hear. It’s about making sure that playwrights, who often work in solitude, don’t feel isolated and alone. It’s about celebrating them and their work while they are still alive, and also uplifting new work that needs space and time to grow and develop. 

We do this because we know it could have made a difference in Inge’s life if he had had something like this. If he had known how much he mattered to so many people. If, somehow, we could have helped him to really feel it. 

I think, too, of the other queer and trans kids growing up in towns like this one who are struggling to figure out where and how they fit in. Who might hear that train whistle, or see planes fly overhead, and feel like they, too, have to hop on the first thing moving out of here in order to be themselves. And maybe they do, but maybe they also want to come back. It’s on us to create spaces that will welcome them back (or make them know they don’t need to leave in the first place). 

It’s on us to create space, in the theatre and in our communities, for them to see themselves and for them to thrive. We need to nurture their voices and honor their stories. 

Theatre, at its best, is a place of belonging, but it takes intentional work to make it so. And it takes a constellation of people to support it: Artistic directors and literary managers, directors, actors, but also audiences and patrons and donors. And as federal and state financial support continues to decline or to put stipulations on funding that artists cannot in good conscience accept, it will take all of us to fund a way forward. The decision about what stories get told and prioritized shouldn’t hinge on finances (though they often do). If we want more stories, we need to find a way to fund more stories and fund the lives of the artists who make those stories. 

If we want to not only continue the legacy of William Inge, but also make a legacy for other playwrights, it will take a commitment from all of us: to show up, to support, to be open, to learn, to grow, and to see each other. 

Inge reminded us that “big people come from small towns.” While our towns might feel different than they once did, it should be less a cause for dismay and instead be seen as an opportunity to build in a new way and to tell a new story, together, about what our future could look like. 

Art helps us to envision new futures for ourselves. It helps us to imagine new ways of being together. It helps us to dream of new possibilities. We need this art now more than ever. 

I came to Independence because of Inge. In many ways I stay because of Inge. Because I believe that more people should know about and honor him and his work, and because I see in him so much of myself: as an artist, as a human. I want to make this place a place that I, and others like me, don’t feel they need to leave in order to live. 

I want to continue to tell the stories of Inge, and of places like Independence, Kansas. Because we are, still, complicated and nuanced people, with hopes and dreams, with private stories and agonies, with traditions that have persisted for years, and with a future still to be written.

Inge saw us. We are still trying to see him. But maybe he can help us to better see and love each other.