Word: picnicers
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...Picnic (by William Inge) has to do with haves and have-nots-but in amatory rather than economic terms, and not always to the haves' advantage. Laid in a small Kansas town, the play tells of a number of women and young girls, of their longings for men and marriage, and of the havoc created among them by a bull-like youth who happens...
...Picnic is a kind of naturalistic round-dance of women hungry for what they have lost or never had or were better off without. Fulfillment is as precarious as frustration: the young girl, in throwing in her lot with the roughneck, is very likely throwing away her life; the teacher and the storekeeper she desperately snares in her cups invoke wedding bells that are more mocking than merry...
...Come Back, Little Sheba, Playwright Inge treats of what is blundering in life, and dryly enough for the play's pity to reside in its pitilessness. Picnic has its very human scenes and characters, its anonymous, quick intensities, and it keeps faith with its material. But about much of it there seems something straggling and merely approximate: it lacks form, it needs more expressive detail, more evocative language. And it is coarsened by Joshua Logan's direction, which often pedal-thumps the sex and placards the humor and pathos...
...Picnic is a good play to see. It is both well-written and well-executed. There is nothing in it, however, that will lift one out of the commonplace rut and place him in another frame of existence. Neither are there characters on the stage who would exist only in an author's well-constructed, never-existent world. To do this, Mr. Inge would have to be an artist. Instead, he is a talented censor, able to sort and to rearrange the various trivia of living, conversation and action, combining a significant grouping of these, to create an excellent reproduction...
...result, one may know little more about either himself or anybody else after seeing Picnic. He will only, perhaps, visualize more clearly some of the things he has already lived through or read about...