Theater: Oedipus Hex

Natural Affection, by William Inge, has the roiling, quivering hysteria of a child’s uncontrollable tantrum. Cruel words and raw emotions splinter against the walls of a three-room Chicago apartment, and the cutting fragments ricochet, wounding lives and severing loves. Like a tantrum, Natural Affection moves in a circular frenzy of grievance; neither the play’s characters nor the play itself can be reasoned with, or placated, or ignored, or resolved. Brief calms are illusory, used chiefly to gulp a shot of bourbon and flog the emotions back up to the pitch of violence. The play might like to be a cry from the heart, but it comes out as an assault on the nerves.

A boy in his late teens, on parole from reform school, comes home to find his mother living with her current lover. The mother, played with tempestuous virtuosity by Kim Stanley, is a head lingerie buyer, a life-scarred career woman abandoned by her son’s father before the child’s birth and spooked by guilt at having herself abandoned the child to an orphanage. She thinks of her son’s delinquency as a disease to be cured with a belatedly massive antibiotic dose of love. The lover (Harry Guardino) is a kind of white-collar Stanley Kowalski, a tiny cog with delusions of becoming a big wheel. “It’s not every guy who can start out being a bartender and work his way up to selling Cadillacs.” he says. He taunts his mistress for being three years older than he is, and nurses his infantile ego on vicuna shirts, cashmere coats and Italian shoes. The boy (Gregory Rozakis) comes into this situation with the icy, withdrawn fury of a human switchblade. Born under a kind of Oedipus hex, he is ready to cut the lover out of his mother’s heart.

Playwright Inge makes these characters rasp on one another’s minds and bodies with the screech of chalk on blackboard. He is a master of the goaded truth that cannot be retracted, and his people topple into an abyss of revelations—that the lover would leave the mother if he made more money, that the mother in her heart of hearts does not love the boy. The Freudian copybook quality of Inge’s thinking ordains that his characters cannot grow or change, but must exhibit fixed complexes. Pushed to the limit, this results in sensual melodrama.

Tony Richardson directs with volcanic intensity, and John Lewis’ hot-cool jazz score makes the action tingle (although music is intrinsically an emotional con game better left to film sound tracks). The cast acts with hypnotic and devastating force; Inge’s people are colloquially recognizable as people, and all the more shocking for it. They involve the viewer, unwilling or not, in their tawdry fates.