Set in the cramped, cluttered Midwesternhouse of Lola and Doc Delaney, the plot centers on how their life is disrupted by the presence of a boarder named Marie, a college art student with a strong lustful appetite. Overweight and slovenly, the housebound middle-aged Lola engages in mild flirtations with the milkman and mailman, like the ingratiating coquette she once was. She sees in Marie herself at that age, and encourages her pursuit of wealthy Bruce and muscular Turk. Doc, who ekes out a living as a chiropractor, was forced to abandon a promising career in medicine when he married a pregnant Lola. She subsequently lost the baby. As a recovering alcoholic, Doc maintains a precarious sobriety by avoiding the past. For him, Marie represents the youth and opportunity he sacrificed, and his eventual realization that she is not as pure and perfect as he imagined sends him back to the bottle and a slow descent into unbridled rage. A forced hospitalization brings him back to sobriety and, with Marie now gone from his home to get married, a reconciliation with Lola. The title refers to Lola's missing dog, who disappeared before the play's opening and remains gone throughout the story. While Lola hopes for the puppy's return throughout the play, calling "Come back, little Sheba" daily from the front door, by the play's end she faces reality and gives up on Sheba's return.
Productions
The play premiered at the Westport Country Playhouse. Presented by the Theatre Guild and directed by Daniel Mann, the first Broadway production premiered at the Booth Theatre on February 15, 1950, and ran 190 performances. The opening night cast included Shirley Booth as Lola, Sidney Blackmer as Doc, and Joan Lorring as Marie. Booth won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play and Blackmer won Best Actor. Reprising her Broadway role, Booth starred opposite Burt Lancaster as Doc and Terry Moore as Marie in a 1952 film adaptation. Booth won both the 1953 Best Actress Academy award and Best Actress - Drama Golden Globe for her portrayal of Lola. In 1974, Clint Ballard, Jr. and Lee Goldsmith adapted the play for the musical stage. Kaye Ballard portrayed Lola in the Chicago tryout, but the production never reached Broadway as planned. In 2001, it was revived under the title Come Back, Little Sheba at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut with Donna McKechnie as Lola. A 1977 television version starred Laurence Olivier as Doc, Joanne Woodward as Lola, and Carrie Fisher as Marie. Granada Television produced the movie as part of its Laurence Olivier Presents anthology series. In 2006, Acorn Media released the movie as part of a DVD set with six other productions from the series. In 1984, the Roundabout Theatre Company mounted an Off Broadway revival, directed by Paul Weidner and starring Shirley Knight as Lola, Philip Bosco as Doc, Mia Dillon as Marie, Steven Weber as Bruce, and Kevin Conroy as Turk. In his review in Time, William A. Henry III observed, "Like all of Inge's best plays, Sheba is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere... 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." A Broadway revival of the Inge play opened on January 24, 2008, at the Biltmore Theatre. Directed by Michael Pressman, it starred S. Epatha Merkerson as Lola, Kevin Anderson as Doc, and Zoe Kazan as Marie, and ran through March 16. In his The New York Times review, Ben Brantley called it a "deeply felt revival" and a "revitalizing production of a play often dismissed as a soggy period piece" and added, "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." In 2017, the Transport Group put up a production Come Back, Little Sheba, which won the Obie Award for performance by Heather MacRae.
