Picnic

“I feel sort of excited…I think we plan picnics just to give ourselves an excuse—to let something thrilling happen in our lives.”
            –Mrs. Potts, Picnic

 

From 1950 when Come Back, Little Sheba opened on Broadway  to 1961 when Splendor in the Grass brought him an Oscar® for Best Screenplay, William Inge was the most successful playwright working in the American theater. His unbroken string of four straight Broadway hits established him as one of the most important writers of the decade. And the films made from those plays in addition to his original screenplay made sure his name was well known from 42nd Street to Main Street. He was a celebrity dramatist with the Midas touch. He seemed to be living a charmed life.

But the Pulitzer Prize, the Hollywood fame and the standing room only audiences masked the darker demons of a troubled man. An alcoholic battling addiction, in and out of analysis and AA, deeply ashamed of his sexuality, Inge carefully hid his troubles from all but his closest associates. This attempt to hide his inner turmoil was mirrored in his work. Plays that were sometimes attacked by critics as a kind of nostalgia for simpler times and places reveal, on closer inspection, a world where heartbreak, loneliness, despair and desperation lurk in the shadows of charming front porches on quaint streets in small Kansas towns.

Inge was never political like Miller, Hellman or Odets. He couldn’t stir up the controversy of the castrations and lobotomies that distinguished Williams’ work. He wrote for the audience, pleased the audience and only hinted at a world engaged in a cold war. So, as new freedoms allowed new forms and daring subjects, Inge fell and fell hard. Almost 40 years after his suicide, the irony is that while his plays are still frequently revived, he is almost an afterthought in the history of the American theater.

I fell in love with Inge’s work when I was 18 and played Picnic’s romantic lead, Hal—don’t laugh; it’s true. I lifted weights and had a terrible rub-on orange tan from a bottle. The experience of working on Inge reveals all the hidden depths lurking beneath the small town drama. I found in his work an authentic regional voice, a writer who places his work firmly in a specific context but reaches far beyond his small corner of Kansas toward the universal and the true. He is a tremendous talent who created characters who deserve their places alongside Blanche Dubois and Willy Loman—characters who are existentially American and searching existentially for something to fight the emptiness of lives lived at the border of despair.

I am thrilled to return to Picnic after so many years. And I am delighted to invite you to share in a theatrical classic that proves nothing can be dated or old fashioned that is written with such brutal honesty in a quest to illuminate the truth.

 

Preston Lane