Picnic

Chautauqua Playhouse, which featured a good community production of William Inge’s Bus Stop last season, has opened up its new season with an even better production of Inge’s masterpiece, Picnic.The story takes place in 1950s small-town Kansas. But this is no pious paean to heartland values; the setting is a house where a single mom is raising two teenage daughters, renting a room to an old-maid schoolteacher to make ends meet.

But everything gets upended when a drifter shows up. He’s good looking—and spends about half the play running around the stage with his shirt off, but he’s wild, and comes from an Arkansas “white trash” background. Soon the older daughter is forgetting her bland boyfriend, the son of a well-to-do businessman.

It’s a story of safety vs. temptation, both sexual (you can feel the heat between handsome, muscular Daniel Hernandez and pretty Amanda Ditto) and social (the desire to leave the humdrum town for the world beyond).

Director Bob Irvin understands this very well and engineers some lovely scenes to bring the point home. The second act, in which the schoolteacher (Sunny Smith) and her boyfriend (Joe Hart) dance and nip whiskey, is simply marvelous. And Irvin skillfully balances that midlife romance against the more dangerous choices being made by the younger lovers. Betsy Warren is also good as the long-suffering mom, while Keren Maisel etches the conflicting emotions of the younger daughter.

There’s also a funny description of an anatomically correct statue of a male figure that’s, ahem, de-sexed at the insistence of a schoolteacher. Irvin doesn’t push the point, but recollecting the recent coverup of Poseidon outside the Community Center Theater at the behest of conservative homeschoolers, or the antics of Attorney General John Ashcroft, you can’t help but wonder if things have really changed since Inge wrote this play in 1952.

—