The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Dec. 16, 1957

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (by William Inge) takes the author, and the audience, back to the small-town world of his 1920s childhood. In a rambling old house it portrays a middle-class family; there is a slightly crude, life-speckled traveling salesman (Pat Hingle) who loves but forever collides with his gently exasperating wife (Teresa Wright). There is their unconfident, boy-frightened teen-age daughter; there is their small son, who can be hard and soft in the wrong places. Everybody, including the wife's sister (Eileen Heckart) and her dentist husband, is so outwardly recognizable, so comfortably life-sized and so frequently...

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