Picnic by William Inge

Reviewed by Gerti

No one seems to remember William Inge, although back when our parents were seeing plays, he was producing classics that we would know, like “Come back, Little Sheba” and “Bus Stop”. “Picnic” is another stereotypical play from the ‘50s, where repressed womenfolk are just waiting to get a glance at a man with his shirt off. How times have changed!

The setting is a Labor Day Weekend, and we’re privy to the back yards of two middle-aged widows, one who has to take care of her cranky, elderly mother, and the other of with 2 daughters to get married off. The latter is named Flo Owens, and she knows her elderly daughter’s value; Marge is a beautiful girl, and Flo is hoping to marry her to a local rich boy. The other woman is Helen Potts, who gets the prefix Mrs., although she was only married for a few hours before her mother had the union annulled. Since this also happens in “The Last Picture Show”, I was familiar with the scenario. As a result, though, Mrs. Potts is, shall we say, interested in having young men help her around the yard. Hal Carter is one of those sexy young men, and as he prances around shirtless, all the ladies in the area get a thrill.

Among those who turn on him when he rejects her advances is a spinster school teacher who has given her all to a local salesman, and is just waiting for him to marry her. Her histrionics are painful to the modern reader. Mrs. Potts satisfies her lusts just feeding Hal and watching him work, but young Millie, Mrs. Owens’ tomboy daughter, is getting ready to become a woman and has her first crush on Hal. She starts drinking (for the first time) to loosen some inhibitions, but ends up getting ill. It’s her lovely older sister Marge who snags the preening Hal, who we learn went to school with her intended fiancé. The two were even in the same fraternity, but Hal turned out bad, since he didn’t have any family money.

The play ends as you might imagine from the work of a male author in the ‘50s; Marge falls so deeply in love with Hal, thinking him a kindred spirit, she throws over her sure-thing boyfriend, much to the chagrin of her scheming mother. But Inge wants us to cheer that action, like anyone in 2016 believes that a woman will fall so much in love within a few hours’ acquaintance that she’ll ruin her entire life for a shirtless man based on a kiss and some muscle-flexing. It’s pretty nauseating that women were once considered so simple and sex-starved. It’s about as based in reality as an episode of “Catfish”.

So I would advise modern readers to pass up this time capsule of a play. I could see how it could be updated, but why? I guess Inge’s attitudes are the reason I can never watch Marilyn Monroe in “Bus Stop” either. The “Picnic” seems in it’s own way to be more old-fashioned than Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, in which the poetic language also makes the out-of-date attitudes palatable.