By Ben Brantley
Jan. 25, 2008

Sometimes, when she stops the restless chatter with which she fills her days and lets the silence take over, Lola Delaney seems to be staring at nothing in the deeply felt revival of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” which opened Thursday night at the Biltmore Theater. Yet as S. Epatha Merkerson portrays this housebound wife of an alcoholic, in a performance that stops the heart, her gaze is anything but empty.

In those moments Ms. Merkerson’s face is devoid of expression, except for her eyes. In them you read, with a clarity that scalds, thoughts that Lola would never admit she is thinking. Because if she did, there would really be no reason for her to keep on living.

The marvel of Ms. Merkerson’s performance in this revitalizing production of a play often dismissed as a soggy period piece is how completely and starkly she allows us to see what Lola sees. Conveying everything while seeming to do nothing is no mean feat — a rare accomplishment expected, perhaps, from seasoned stage stars like Vanessa Redgrave (in “The Year of Magical Thinking”) or Lois Smith (in the recent revival of “The Trip to Bountiful”).

But though she has appeared on Broadway before (receiving a Tony nomination for her work in August Wilson’s “Piano Lesson”), Ms. Merkerson is principally known as Lt. Anita Van Buren, the no-nonsense police boss of “Law & Order” on television. Her style on the small screen is naturalistic, low-key and determinedly untheatrical.

That’s also her style in “Come Back, Little Sheba,” in which she recreates a part originated with award-winning showiness by Shirley Booth on stage (1950) and screen (1952). Yet Ms. Merkerson allows a kind of intimate access traditionally afforded by cinematic close-ups, when the camera finds shades of meaning in impassive faces. She rarely signals what Lola’s feeling; she just seems to feel, and we get it, instantly and acutely. Such emotional sincerity is the hallmark of this revival from the Manhattan Theater Club, directed with gentle compassion by Michael Pressman and featuring first-rate performances from Kevin Anderson and Zoe Kazan. The production’s commitment to its characters uncovers surprising virtues in William Inge’s play, his first New York success.

There was a time, in the mid-20th century, when Inge (1913-1973) was spoken of in the same breath as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Thoreau’s much-quoted words about “lives of quiet desperation” were regularly and mistily invoked to describe the ordinary people of waning hopes in Inge’s plays, which were regularly translated to film (“Picnic,” “Bus Stop,” “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs”).

By the late 1960s Inge’s small, tidy canvases seemed unlikely candidates for posterity compared to the more grandly scaled work of Williams and Miller. His Freudian take on repressed American sexuality was regarded as archaic; so was his careful, paint-by-numbers dramaturgy.

In Mr. Pressman’s production, you can still see what Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times of a 1984 revival of “Little Sheba,” called “Inge’s transparent manipulation of his dramatic machinery.” But the performances here are so convincingly present tense that you come to accept scene-shaping contrivances — those too conveniently timed entrances, exits and phone calls — as if life were really that structured.

It’s the quietness in “quiet desperation” that Mr. Pressman and his cast highlight here in portraying a few days, both eventful and typical, in the claustrophobic lives of Lola and Doc (Mr. Anderson), a chiropractor of dashed ambitions trying to stay off the sauce. Like Ms. Merkerson’s anchoring performance, this production resounds precisely because it keeps its voice down.

Though slim on plot, “Come Back, Little Sheba” could easily tilt toward giggly hysteria. After all, it is, in large part, a play about s-e-x from the zipped-up 1950s (scarily summoned in Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes) and how the pursuit of primal instincts derails everyday lives. Set in Doc and Lola’s cramped, cluttered house (cannily designed by James Noone and hauntingly lighted by Jane Cox), the story centers on the disruptions caused by their boarder, Marie (Ms. Kazan), a clean-cut college student of healthy carnal appetites.

The middle-aged Lola, running to fat and slovenliness, sees in Marie an idealized version of her younger self and encourages (and spies on) the girl in her “tall spooning” with her boyfriends (Brian J. Smith and Chad Hoeppner). Doc, forced to abandon a career in medicine when he married a pregnant Lola years before, sees in Marie a purity missing from his life. His eventual realization that she is not the paragon he hoped is enough to have him reaching for the bottle and going berserk.

Mr. Pressman, making his Broadway debut, subtly elicits a feminist subtext from this anxious triangle. In Lola’s coy prurience about Marie’s love life and her awkward flirtations with any tradesman who drops by the house (the milkman and postman, natch, nicely portrayed by Matthew J. Williamson and Lyle Kanouse), we see a woman who has outgrown the only role she ever learned to play: the cute, ingratiating coquette, trading on sexual promise.

Correspondingly Ms. Kazan, who is emerging as one of the busiest and best young actresses in New York, presents Marie as a young woman who knows that her most essential bargaining tool is her sex. She’s sharper than Lola (Ms. Kazan is terrific in conveying the character’s self-consciousness), and she’s sure to wind up richer. But you have the feeling she’ll ultimately be just as trapped.

That Ms. Merkerson is an African-American in a predominantly white cast only underscores the sense of Lola’s enforced passivity. For a white man to marry a black woman in the Midwest of the 1950s would truly have squelched any chances for conventional success. And every time Doc looks at Lola, you can feel him assessing everything he’s given up.

Mr. Anderson refreshingly plays down the character’s grim sorrowfulness and emphasizes the well-groomed fastidiousness that keeps Doc at a disdainful remove from all that Lola embodies. That he is not a sloppy drunk but one of icy anger and contempt, gives his big breakdown scene an almost unbearable harshness.

His scalpel-edged viciousness in that scene means that Doc wounds Lola with surgical exactness. And Ms. Merkerson responds with an abjectness that makes you want to rush the stage and intervene. All through the play, Lola has had the air of someone expecting to be rebuffed, put down, hit or sent packing, whether cozying up to Doc or making nice with her supremely competent neighbor (Brenda Wehle, excellent).

Her compulsive chattiness on all subjects — including Little Sheba, the dog that disappeared from her life as completely and inexplicably as her youth — is obviously for keeping at bay the fears that steal up on her when it’s quiet. Ms. Merkerson and this production make sure that even when Lola is talking a blue streak, we also always hear the unspeakable gray silence that lies beneath.

COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA

By William Inge; directed by Michael Pressman; sets by James Noone; costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser; lighting by Jane Cox; sound by Obadiah Eaves; music by Peter Golub; fight director, J. David Brimmer; production stage manager, James Fitzsimmons; general manager, Florie Seery; associate artistic director/production, Mandy Greenfield; production manager, Kurt Gardner. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director; Barry Grove, executive producer; Daniel Sullivan, acting artistic director. At the Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through March 16. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Joseph Adams (Elmo), Kevin Anderson (Doc), Chad Hoeppner (Bruce), Daniel Damon Joyce (Messenger), Lyle Kanouse (Postman), Zoe Kazan (Marie), S. Epatha Merkerson (Lola), Brian J. Smith (Turk), Keith Randolph Smith (Ed), Brenda Wehle (Mrs. Coffman) and Matthew J. Williamson (Milkman).