stated inWilliam Inge that Rosemary reaches out ‘‘pitifully toward Howard, not because she really loves him, but because she fears she will continue to live her life ‘till I'm ready for the grave and don't have anyone to take me there.’’’ Howard underestimates Rosemary's desperation for marriage and the fact that he is her sole marital target. While funny, this element of comedy is also tragic, in that it reveals all of Rosemary's insecurities and fears and makes clear the stereotype that she represents: the spinster schoolteacher, too unattractive to marry and resigned to a lifetime of devotion to her students. Their romance contrasts with the Madge/Hal relationship, which deviated from the expected in Inge's original ending. When the playwright changed the ending to fit Logan's vision, he not only reaffirmed traditional expectations of conventional comedic theatre but also rendered Picnic as a non-threatening social commentary.

Jane Courant argued in Studies in American Drama 1945-Present that these romances represent much more than ‘‘faithful renderings of cliches of culture, language, and behavior during a period characterized by extreme social conformity.’’ She reminded readers that Inge's plays almost predicts the changes that would come in film and music in the next few years. The advent of films depicting freedom-craving bad boys like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Peter Fonda seems to echo Hal's observations about his theft of a motorcycle. Hal stole the motorcycle because he ‘‘wanted to get on the damn thing and go so far away, so fast, that no one'd ever catch up with me.’’ The motorcycle is a symbol of freedom, a means for escape, rebellion, and adventure—all things that Hal needs to survive. These are the same elements that motivate the film rebels of Brando's The Wild One (1954), Dean's Rebel without A Cause (1955), and Fonda's Easy Rider (1969). Just as importantly, they are the same needs that appeal to Madge, who finds Hal's story romantically exciting. When she says, ‘‘I think—lots of boys feel that way at times,’’ she is also silently adding—and girls, too.

The sexuality of music and dance that Inge incorporates into Act II establishes the mood for the sexual encounters that follow. When Hal begins to dance with Madge, the act is seductive, as Inge intended it to be. His stage directions refer to their dance as a ‘‘primitive rite that would mate the two young people.’’ Inge is confirming that music and dance can serve as a prelude to physical love, planting the seed of fear that would flower in many parents' suspicions of teenagers and rock and roll. Courant wrote that a year after Picnic opened in 1953, the first volley of rock and roll songs, by such artists as Bill Haley and the Comets, would shake the world of popular music; Elvis Presley's subsequent arrival would herald a new era of sexuality in music. Hal's appropriation of music and dance as foreplay is a prologue to the pattern that would be established in the ‘‘teenybopper’’ films of such entertainers as Presley, Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello. In these films, young people were brought together through music and dance, and while these movies are chaste in comparison to the explicit films of later decades, the implication of sex was very clear. Inge used Madge and Hal to establish a picture of youthful love and sexuality that was just on the horizon.

In an interview that he gave to writer Walter Wager in The Playwrights Speak, Inge said that he was not a social activist and that he thought very little in political terms. Yet later, in the same interview, he stated that he saw a new generation of American youth ‘‘challenging the cliches of the established culture … [and] creating cliches of their own.’’ It is this questioning of convention that Inge tries to capture in his play. Madge rejects the image of beauty that encapsulates her life. She wants to be noticed and admired for qualities that have nothing to do with her appearance. She also wants more than the American Dream marriage ideal that her mother envisions in a union with Alan. She recognizes her intellectual limitations and laments her future as a clerk; it is her jealousy of Millie's academic achievements that creates much of the sisterly conflict in the play. But while Madge may be less intellectual than her younger sister, she is pragmatic. At the play's ending, when Madge is challenged by her mother, Madge tells her that she does not believe that loving Hal will provide all the answers. She acknowledges Hal's poor record with women and his lack of economic prospects.

Madge's awareness of the love's limitations contradicts critic Gerald Weales's appraisal of Picnic in American Drama since World War II. Weales argued that ‘‘the prevailing message of the play is that love is a solution to all social, economic, and psychological problems.’’ Certainly this is not true of the original ending that Inge intended for his play, but even the sanitized Broadway version permits Madge to raise doubts about her future, serving up a cynical view of love and its power to solve problems. When Flo tells Madge that Hal "will never be able to support you … he'll spend all his money on booze. After a while there'll be other women," Madge replies, ‘‘I've thought of all those things.’’ Isolated in this last scene, these words indicate that Madge is rejecting reality in favor of romance, but that perception ignores Madge's earlier expressions, her stated desire to leave town and find freedom. It ignores her longing glances toward the train and her fear that all the town has to offer is a lifetime of clerking in a small store. This information makes Madge's decision to follow Hal far more plausible. To her, Hal represents the best opportunity for escape from the nothingness of small town life, from an existence based solely on beauty. At the beginning of the play, Madge is, indeed, ‘‘marking time,’’ as Ima Honaker Herron noted in the Southwest Review, she is waiting for something better to come along. By the end of the third act, she has found that something. In leaving she is taking a chance, but she is also hoping to insure that she will not end up one of the lonely, aimless women of this small Kansas town. She has escaped.

Source: Sheri E. Metzger, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999. Metzger is a Ph.D. specializing in literature and drama at the University of New Mexico.

When is a classic born? When a once highly successful commercial play, revived several decades later, is found to be speaking just as strongly to the time of its revival. At that point you exclaim, ‘‘Damn it, this is art, after all!’’ That has now happened to Picnic, thanks to the Roundabout Theatre revival, and one only wishes that the playwright, William Inge, a lonely suicide in 1973 who would have turned 81 this year, could have lived to see it.

Picnic (1953), Inge's second hit after Come Back, Little Sheba, ran for two years in sold-out houses, but the one person it never made happy was its author. Inge had originally written a much bleaker play, Front Porch, which Joshua Logan helped him rewrite less hopelessly as Picnic, and which he later rewrote again, gloomily and unsuccessfully, as Summer Brave. What Logan correctly perceived is that a happy ending need not be sappy. When the beautiful but very ordinary Madge leaves her rich boyfriend Alan to run after the handsome, likable, but shiftless Hal, a romantic yearning in the audience is satisfied. But whether the resultant union will be a fulfillment or a fiasco is anybody's guess. Similarly, when the homely schoolteacher Rosemary begs, bullies, and wheedles the bibulous shopkeeper Howard into converting their affair into a marriage, there is no sense of triumph in it. Over all hangs the shadow of Flo, whose husband died young, and who had to raise Madge and her younger sister, Millie, a tomboy with artistic leanings, all by her weary, lonesome self.

Hal, a college chum of Alan's, dropped out and became a drifter. He returns to their Kansas town in the hope of employment, which Alan warmly offers him. In the end, he doesn't take the job but gets Madge, Alan's girl, leaving his would-be benefactor shaken. Ditto Flo, who so wanted her pretty daughter to marry up, not down. Hal also brings early sorrow to Millie, who forsook her tomboyish ways and put on a dress for a date with him for the Labor Day picnic. That eponymous bucolic romp, which we never actually see, also eludes the hero and heroine, who find a fiercer, less innocent, joy. A happy ending? Sort of, but with shadows lurking all around.

Scott Ellis, who directed, has made small, helpful changes in the text, mostly cutting out the ‘‘Baby’’s that Hal keeps hurling at Madge. He also set the action in the thirties to achieve a sense of distance. And he has done wonders with train whistles that weave their siren calls around these hinterland-locked characters. He has called on his (and our) favorite choreographer, Susan Stroman, to devise the crucial dance in which Hal and Madge first make contact. And he has eliminated the two act breaks, thus allowing the hot, clotted atmosphere of Indian summer to hold uninterrupted sway. From Louis Rosen, he got the right, ingenuous music.

Ashley Judd is not so beautiful a Madge as was Janice Rule (‘‘Pre-Raphaelite,’’ Logan called her), yet she gives a slow-building, implication-laden, almost too intelligent performance that prevails. Kyle Chandler does not have the animal magnetism of Ralph Meeker's 1953 Hal but brings to the role a sinewy, idiosyncratic presence that gradually scores. Polly Holliday is a touchingly oversolicitous Flo, and Debra Monk a rendingly desperate Rosemary, while Larry Bryggman makes Howard into a splendidly tragicomic figure. The others all contribute handsomely, but none more so than Tony Walton's spot-on scenery, William Ivey Long's canny costuming, or Peter Kaczorowski's lyrical lighting. The true protagonist, though, is the atmosphere: a sense of something pent-up longing to break out. Some escape, others resign themselves; hard to tell the winners from the losers.

Source: John Simon, ‘‘Hairy Fairy Tale’’ in New York, Vol. 27, no. 18, May 2, 1994.

It is the supreme distinction of Mr. William Inge's world to exist solidly, as an imaginative fact, with more energy and vitality than that of any American dramatist of his generation. Neither deliquescent, as is that of Tennessee Williams nor shaped by Arthur Miller's blunt polemic rage, it is a world existing solely by virtue of its perceived manners—a perception which, as Mr. Lionel Trilling observed in another connection, is really only a function of love. The poetry, in Mr. Inge's plays, is all in the pity; he gives us the hard naturalistic surface, but with a kind of interior incandescence. What Elizabeth Bowen said of Lawrence defines Mr. Inge also: in his art, every bush burns.

At the center of ‘‘Picnic’’ is a sexual situation, common and gross, but orchestrated by the playwright with a subtlety of detail and a breadth of reference dazzling in their sensibility; the form, then, is that of a theme with variations. Into a community of women—widowed, single, adolescent, virgin—comes an aggressively virile young man. What the play studies, in all its disturbing ramifications, is exclusively his sexual impact on them: the initial movements of distaste and scorn, then a kind of musky stirring of memory and desire, followed by passion and willful hatred, subsiding in quiescence and resignation. It is a graph of emotion most beautifully and skillfully described, issuing in the simple wisdom of Mr. Inge's old spectator who, after this savage eruption of ‘‘life,’’ can still see that ‘‘he was a man, and I was a woman, and it was good.’’

I have done the fine articulation of Mr. Inge's play the injustice of paraphrase. But nothing in ‘‘Picnic’’ lacks the sting of truth. All of its observation springs from some point of hard personal knowledge, some perception to which Mr. Inge has come by pain. His characters are small, but genuine in their pathos, most moving in their naked impotence before life. The script has, moreover, the benefit of a remarkable production, somewhat coarsened perhaps by Joshua Logan's strident direction, but otherwise limpid, sensual, grateful to the eye and ear.

Its second act concludes with a sustained, complex scene that is among the more notable achievements of the American theatre. It is a kind of ritual dance, involving the boy and girl only as sexual objects, but merciless in its exposure of the skein of envy, desire and psychic desolation which surround them.

Having committed myself to this degree, I feel ungrateful at expressing some fears as to the limitation of Mr. Inge's talent. He seems to me, at this juncture, an artist whose sensibility still exceeds the dispositions of his intellect—that is, his power to order and clarify experience is inadequate to his imaginative apprehension of it. Mr. Inge's ‘‘detachment,’’ of which we hear so much, may be esthetically desirable, but I suspect a deeper search might reveal it as the characteristic attitude of a mind stunned, numbed by life. How else account for the curious inertia of Mr. Inge's plays, their lack of moral reverberation, their acquiescence in disaster? I offer these observations not as a reproach, but only as points of departure for an inquiry into the mysterious blemishes which mar this most remarkable American talent.

Source: Richard Hayes, review of Picnic in Commonweal, Vol. LVII, no. 24, March 20, 1953, p. 603.

The young girl in William Inge's new play, ‘‘Picnic’’ (Music Box Theater), like Shaw's ‘‘ingenue,’’ is waiting for something to happen. But the environment of the American play—specifically Kansas— is a place where nothing can happen to anybody. The women are all frustrated by fearful, jerky men; the men are ignorant, without objective, ideals, or direction—except for their spasmodic sexual impulses. There is no broad horizon for anyone, and a suppressed yammer of desire emanates from every stick and stone of this dry cosmos, in which the futile people burn to cinders.

If you read my description and then see the play you will be either vastly relieved or shockingly disappointed. For though what I have said may still be implicit in the words, it is hardly present on the stage. I happen to have read the playscript before it was put into rehearsal, and I saw in it a laconic delineation of a milieu seen with humor and an intelligent sympathy that was not far from compassion. What is on the stage now is a rather coarse boy-and-girl story with a leeringly sentimental emphasis on naked limbs and ‘‘well-stacked’’ females. It is as if a good Sherwood Anderson novel were skilfully converted into a prurient popular magazine story on its way to screen adaptation.

In this vein the play is extremely well done. It is certainly effective. Joshua Logan, who is a crackerjack craftsman, has done a meticulous, shrewd, thoroughly knowledgeable job of staging. He has made sharply explicit everything which the audience already understands and is sure to enjoy in the ‘‘sexy’’ plot, and has fobbed off everything less obvious to which the audience ought to be made sensitive.

All pain has been removed from the proceedings. The boy in the script who was a rather pathetic, confused, morbidly explosive and bitter character is now a big goof of a he-man whom the audience can laugh at or lust after. The adolescent sister who was a kind of embryo artist waiting to be born has become a comic grotesque who talks as if she suffered from a hare-lip; the drained and repressed mother is presented as a sweet hen almost indistinguishable from her chicks; the tense school teacher bursting with unused vitality is foreshortened as a character and serves chiefly as a utility figure to push the plot. Even the setting, which—for the purposes of the theme—might have suggested the dreary sunniness of the Midwestern flatlands, has been given a romantically golden glow and made almost tropically inviting.

Having seen the play with this bifocal vision—script and production—I cannot be sure exactly what the audience gets from the combination. Lyric realism in the sound 1920 tradition of the prairie novelists is being offered here as the best Broadway corn. In the attempt to make the author's particular kind of sensibility thoroughly acceptable, the play has been vulgarized.

The cast is good—Kim Stanley is particularly talented, though I disliked the characterization imposed on her—and it follows the director with devoted fidelity. There is a new leading lady, Janice Rule, who besides having a lovely voice is unquestionably the most beautiful young woman on our stage today.

Here at any rate is a solid success. But I am not sure whether the author should get down on his knees to thank the director for having made it one or punch him in the nose for having altered the play's values. It is a question of taste.

Source: Harold Clurman, review of Picnic in the Nation, Vol. 176, no. 10, March 7, 1953, p. 213.