A Loss of Roses

by William Inge

As told by Chapman: "The setting.is a modest bungalow in a small town near Kansas City, and here lives Miss Field, a widow, and her twenty-one-year-old son.The time is 1933-the -and they are lucky to have jobs, she as a hospital nurse and he as a gas station attendant. The young man is petulant and demanding, and his mother is loving in a mournful way, for she wishes the boy were the man his late father was. Into the house moves a friend from long ago.a stranded tank-town actress. She finds sanctuary here in return for doing the cooking and housework; it is to be a temporary setup, just long enough for the actor she has consorted with to find another job for them in Kansas City ." The actress and the son become involved in a brief affair, and he proposes marriage, only to change his mind the following day. Heartsick, the actress returns to the life she loathes, and the son decides to strike out on his own.

Genres: Plays, Theatre

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Dramas of American playwright William Motter Inge explored the expectations and fears of small-town Midwesterners; his play Picnic (1953) won a Pulitzer Prize.

Works of this novelist typically feature solitary protagonists, encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, Broadway produced a memorable string. Inge rooted his portraits of life and settings in the heartland.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hello, yes, hi. I read this play over Thanksgiving break and didn't realize it was on Goodreads! Welp, last year wasn't that long ago, so I'm just going to put it towards this year's reading goal.

[Otis Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Inge’s 1959 stage play A Loss of Roses is a slow-bleeding, heavy-hearted drama about a twenty-one-year-old mama's boy who gets tangled up in a romantic briar patch thicker than a June blackberry bush. Set back in the muddy, rain-soaked summer of 1933 in a small town outside Kansas City, this one is fuller of small-town misery and unfulfilled yearnings than a country church during a drought. Here’s the small bunch of lonely souls stewing in that little Midwestern house. Kenny Baird: A twenty-one-year-old gas station worker who is stuck tighter than a rusted bolt to his mama. He’s resentful, stubborn, and can't decide if he wants to be the man of the house or a coddled toddler. Helen Baird: Kenny’s widowed mama. She’s a god-fearing nurse who spends her days walking on eggshells around her son, trying to love him without letting him swallow her whole. Lila Green: An old family friend and a tent-show actress down on her luck. She’s a beautiful, fragile soul who arrives like a stray cat looking for a porch, carrying a dark past and a powerful need to be cared for. When Lila moves into the spare room to hide out from her abusive boyfriend, she throws a match right into Kenny and Helen's damp gunpowder. Kenny gets a sudden hankering for this older, sophisticated woman, and Lila—lonely enough to mistake a boy's fumbling heat for real shelter—gives in. It sets off a quiet explosion that changes everyone's weather by the final curtain. This play flopped harder than a dropped skillet on Broadway back in its day, but looking at it now, it’s a powerful, dark slice of American gothic history. It doesn't have a happy, bow-tied ending, but it shows with brutal honesty how hard it is for a young man to cut his mama's apron strings without tearing his own skin off in the process.

[William Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sadly a flop in its first production—despite the talents and charms of Warren Beatty, Michael J. Pollard, and Carol Haney (the first two relative unknowns)—this is a lovely work and classic Inge. Depression-era desperation and survival, rite of initiation, and Freudian family drama rolled into one. A bit overstuffed and ambitious, yes, with a few moments of slightly creaky exposition, it’s moving and darkly delightful all the same. The main characters each have some secrets to spill, the secondary characters are funny—everyone is well drawn, really. The climax may strike some as histrionic or melodramatic, but it more than works in the play and of its time. As with many of Inge’s works (BUS STOP aside), there’s a distinct queerness lurking, either literally or as a metaphor/mood of marginal, frustrated desire. Later playwrights could lean much more directly in this direction, but there’s something powerful about midcentury, Hays Code and cultural homophobia-repressed representations of queer longing (and in some cases queer revenge fantasy—see STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE BAD SEED, for instance).

Deserves to be restaged.

[Christopher Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Inges strongest play but possibly his most bleak. A mother unable to move past her husband's death. A directionless son under her thumb and in his father's shadow. An actress during the depression who idealizes romantic love. Performing a tense trapeze act as their humors clash and no one comes out unscathed.

[Claire Fry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Truly a terrible play. It’s good to read if you want to be reminded how even successful writers have flops. Quite misogynistic, and you are beaten over the head with the Oedipus complex theme.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, old fashioned, marvellously written American play full of incest,
"blue" jobs, dumb guys, and broad batterin'. Makes a heart weep...

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly my favorite play to date. Definitely worth a read. It's about an actress during the Great Depression. Read it!