Word: picnics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...author of Picnic. William Inge is an accomplished technician. He is quite capable of compressing paragraphs and pages of conversation into concise sentences, so that his characters speak, breathe, sweat, and scratch like normal human beings. Picnic is a very successful exercise in reality...
...Picnic's drama is in the conflict of a beautiful young girl, who must choose between a stable, uninteresting, but rich young man or a poor, confused, dynamic intruder. In a skillful first act, Inge makes it clear that his resolution in the second act is an inevitability. The third ties up the consequences. Except for occasional dramatic irony dealing with a few frustrated school teachers, the action is tense and expectant, moving, as one reviewer has already commented, "from climax to climax...
...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...
...virtually reeled with esthetic shock when I came upon your statement . . . Such vigorous works as Robinson Jeffers' Roan Stallion and Tamar, or Conrad Aiken's Punch: The Immortal Liar, make Eliot's poetic vintage seem about as heady as a watered-down glass of school-picnic cider...