A Larger Table

William Inge’s play, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” is the story of the healing of the dysfunctional aspects of an entire family, the Floods, each member of which is plagued by some form of fear. The title comes from the little boy Sonny’s fear of walking up a staircase draped in darkness. He is a whiny child, neurotically attached to his mother and antagonistic to his father. But it his sister Reenie who is the primary focus of the redemptive process. She is a shy and self-effacing teenager, who uses her musical talent more as an escape from social interaction that as self-expression. As the play opens, we find her anxious about an upcoming dance at the town’s country club, hosted by the affluent Ralstons. She is cynical about the invitation she has received to such an elite event, worried that she might be rejected by her peers, and concerned about how her blind date will react to her. Cora, the mother, is insecure in her own way. Dissatisfied with her husband’s job and their social standing, worried that her husband married her only because she was pregnant, she dotes on her children and fantasizes about a different life for the family. Rubin, her husband, is a somewhat macho male who resents having given up his freedom. But we eventually learn that he has lost his job and is plagued with fear about taking a new one in a field he knows little about. As the plot unfolds, healing comes to each individual and to the family as a whole, but at a terrible price, paid by a character from outside the family who becomes an obvious Christ-figure. That character is Sammy Goldenbaum, Reenie’s date for the dance. He is a Jewish student at a military academy who has suffered both from anti-Jewishness and from his mother—a small-part actor who has paid little attention to him as she has gone through a string of husbands he has not even met.

Prior to the dance, Rubin finds out that Cora had bought Reenie an expensive dress and flies into a rage. A bitter argument ensues, and in a fit of anger Rubin hits Cora and storms out of the house; and we are left wondering whether he will ever return. Of course, Reenie blames herself for what has happened. On the morning after the dance, we learn that the event had been a disaster for Reenie. By her account, Sammy had left her to go off with another girl. But Reenie’s friend Flirt shows up with devastating news and a more accurate account of what happened. Humiliated when no one cut in on her and Sammy for several dances, Reenie introduced Sammie to another girl and retreated to the rest room. While she was hiding there, an inebriated Mr. Ralston confronted Sammy and told him that the country club was not for Jews. Badly shaken, Sammy asked for Reenie and, when he could not find her, left; then he checked into a hotel and hurled himself out of the window to his death.

When Reenie hears this, she is forced into a moment of painful realization: “He asked for me . . . for me. The only time anyone ever wanted me, or needed me, in my entire life. And I wasn’t there. I didn’t stop once to consider . . . Sammy. I’ve always thought I was the only person who had any feelings at all.”

As painful as it is, this recognition is the beginning of a process of healing. As I commented in another context, Reenie “had failed Sammy because her self-effacement had kept her from developing her own potential and desensitized her to the needs of others. In such a moment of truth, one faces a decision: either to turn once more inward, with a heightened sense of guilt and self-hatred and increased antagonism toward the unaccepting world, or to reach out in a quest for genuine mutuality.” As the play draws to a close, there are signs that she chooses the latter route. When she plays a piece of Chopin for her father, for instance, we can see that she is no longer using her music as an escape. We can also see changes in the other characters after Rubin returns home and offers a heartfelt apology.

[Cora] can now see that her romanticized attitude has fed her children’s problems and that her materialistic and domesticizing view of success has driven a wedge between Rubin and herself. Rubin and Sonny are in turn changed through Cora’s renewal. Sonny is able to find his own inner strength, and Rubin can face an uncertain future with the assuredness that love provides. Rubin’s apology and confession of his inner fears, moreover, signal a crack in his macho defensiveness that opens the way for a more tender way of relating to Cora.

To accept Sammy Goldenbaum as a Christ-figure is to invite reflection on the concrete effects we should expect to see in the Christian notion of redemption in Christ--unless we are satisfied with reducing redemption to a free ticket to heaven. The lives of the Flood family members were radically transformed by Sammy Goldenbaum’s death. Neurotic guilt and self-negation were replaced with a healthy guilt that was overcome by the acceptance of another’s care. Fears were conquered, opening the characters up to rich and meaningful new lives. Fantasies were abandoned in favor of actual human experience. Quarrelsomeness gave way to joy. Are these transformations not in fact something like what we should expect when we speak of redemption? The play, by the author’s own admission drawing upon Christian theology, can thus have a profound effect on how we understand the meaning of Christ’s death for the living of our lives in this world. I do not mean to equate Christian salvation with psychological health or socialization, but unless we recognize a significant overlap we risk emptying our understanding of redemption of all existential content. As theologian Kathryn Tanner observes, Christianity was somewhat distinctive in the context of the Greco-Roman world for envisioning salvation not simply as protection from harm while remaining in one’s present state but actual transformation: it meant “to be elevated beyond oneself, so as to participate in the very life of God, to share in the very properties of God’s own life—eternal life.”

I remember from my seminary days two comments of fellow students. One said, “I can speak of the gospel only in psychological terms.” The other said that once he accepted the gospel he never despaired again. Of course, the transformation of which Tanner writes does not bring about instant psychological health or socialization, and neither the psychological nor the sociological dimensions of redemption exhaust its meaning. But that transformation must impact these areas of life if it is to constitute anything more than an other-worldly, essentially mythological phenomenon. And I find that the traditional understanding of original sin risks missing this kind of impact. I do not believe that we are saved from some inherited flaw handed down by our ancestors. I do believe, however, that there are social, psychological, and existential forces that have enormous power to distort human life and that the gospel message of God’s acceptance of us in our “fallen” state empowers us as we wrestle with these. A secular witness such as “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” can help us understand that, and it can also sensitize us to dimensions of sin that lie outside our personal interactions. The play also confronts us with the social sins of anti-Jewishness and other forms of bigotry, the exclusiveness of some social groups, and oppressiveness of class distinctions. It thus hints ever so subtly at the need for the kind of transformation that Jesus envisioned when he spoke of the coming Realm of God.

© Russell Pregeant


Russell Pregeant
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