Ben
Brantley

July 8, 2015

The beautiful woman in the bath towel is fast succumbing to the advances of the hunky, hairy-chested man who has forced his way into her rustic hideaway. She’s a society princess; he’s a freelance taxi driver, whose true calling is to seek out lonely women who need his special kind of loving. And as he pins her against the kitchen counter, she wraps her legs around him and offers a breathless prayer of gratitude that includes these deathless words: “Thank you for jamming your foot into my door.” Where’s Charles Busch when you need him? This window-steaming moment from “Off the Main Road” — a previously unproduced play by William Inge that is receiving its premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival — would seem to cry out for a vintage-Hollywood diva impersonator of Mr. Busch’s caliber. The task has instead fallen to Kyra Sedgwick, best known for her Emmy-winning portrayal of the resourceful police interrogator in “The Closer,” someone who would never allow herself to get stuck beneath a drooling cabby. As the heroine of Inge’s play, which was most likely written in the early 1960s, her tricky mission at moments like this is to hold on to her dignity (which she does) and stave off giggles in the audience (which is pretty much impossible).