Theatre in Review: Picnic (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)"Mind if I start a fire?" So asks Hal Carter, the hunky young drifter who has stopped in a hot Kansas town long enough to set off a conflagration of aroused passions among the women assembled in a communal backyard on a steamy Labor Day. The ladies are mostly unattached, because of death, age, eccentricity, or just because. They've been so busy playing the hands life has dealt them that they've forgotten about the power of desire -- that is, until muscular, footloose Hal wanders into their presence. The unintended consequences that follow are what make Picnic a bona fide American classic. William Inge hit a nerve with his tale of a small town upset by a sexy, none-too-bright drifter; Picnic won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, became one of the decade's key Hollywood films, was adapted for the musical stage (unsuccessfully), was made into an opera, and has been revived in television, Broadway, and regional and community theatres everywhere. It's a tricky one, however -- sensual and sensitive in equal measure. Lean too far in one direction, and you end up with pure melodrama; go too far the other way, and audiences will wonder what all the fuss is about. (The last Broadway revival, 20 years ago -- also at Roundabout -- lacked the necessary heat.) On the face of it, Sam Gold, the preferred director of some of today's better young playwrights, wasn't necessarily the first choice for this material; his style seems too casual, too deadpan, too ironic. But by applying the same patient pacing and close attention to detail that worked with The Big Meal, Kin, The Aliens, and Circle Mirror Transformation, Gold lays the foundation for a most inviting Picnic. Indeed, the director, aided by a first-rate cast, has found a hundred little ways of revealing the tempests roiling the souls of Inge's characters. You see it in the way Ellen Burstyn's Helen Potts fumbles for a doorknob while keeping her eyes on Hal, or how Mare Winningham's Flo Owens, who has no use for handsome drifters, dismisses Hal with the subtlest sweep of her hand, a casual gesture that bespeaks a world of worry underneath. There are many more revealing moments -- when Madeleine Martin's Millie, one of Flo's daughters and a tomboy to the bone, enters, tentatively wearing her first party dress; when Elizabeth Marvel's Rosemary, a schoolteacher fed up with her spinster existence, halts before the front porch of her boarding house, suddenly terrified to go in; and when Reed Birney's Howard, a middle-aged bachelor, stumbles onstage, looking pole-axed as he realizes that he has been tricked into marriage. People tend to talk about Picnic as if it is mostly about sex, but Inge's vision is rather more complicated. Loneliness, of a peculiar sort native to the American Midwest, was his great subject. His characters lead profoundly conventional, usually unexamined lives; the appearance of sex, in the form of a stranger, casts a harshly revealing light on the barrenness in which they dwell. In the world of Picnic, physically beautiful people are borderline freaks onto whom the others project their unspoken desires. Madge, Flo's daughter (a lovely, delicate performance by Maggie Grace), isn't really happy being the town bombshell; she's sadly aware of her limitations, indicated by her job as a dime store clerk. (In the kind of acid observation only a sister could provide, Millie says Madge is "so dumb that they practically had to burn down the schoolhouse to get [her] out of it.") Madge is also uncomfortable with the way the essentially decent Flo tends her like an asset to be sold to Alan, scion of a local wealthy family. Despite the envy surrounding her, she's a lost soul, waiting for something, anything, to arrive and give her life meaning. Hal (the excellent Sebastian Stan) survived an abusive childhood to become a high school football hero, but everything that followed has been a disappointment. Drifting in and out of several colleges, getting picked up by predatory women, and falling into trouble with the law, he has let every opportunity slip through his fingers. In some of Picnic's best passages, he pathetically boasts about his past, making up stories that anyone can see are the fabrications of a loser desperate for a reason to feel good about himself. When Hal and Madge get a look at one another, it's not just passion, it's the shock of recognition; each knows what it's like to be prized for one's beauty alone, and the loneliness it engenders. Gold handles the scenes between Hal and Madge with a winning mixture of sizzle and tact that makes their affair as inevitable as it is wrongheaded. (Neither shows much in the way of maturity; their neediness is too great.) An impromptu dance turns into a slow spiral of seduction. Their illicit nighttime rendezvous, beautifully lit by Jane Cox using the glow of a streetlight, simmers with sensuality. As they fall into a clinch, Hal seizes Madge's little clutch bag and hurls it away, a gesture that powerfully reveals how he will not be denied. Later, when Hal, thoroughly disgraced, all but begs Madge to run away, his terror at losing the only woman who has ever understood him, is heartbreaking. The director's solid control is most evident in the play's signature scene, in which the drunken, desperate Rosemary begs her longtime boyfriend, Howard, to marry her. As written, it's an invitation to take a few bites out of the scenery; see Rosalind Russell in Joshua Logan's 1955 film. Instead, Marvel flips our expectations; in her hands, the boisterous, wisecracking Rosemary quietly implodes; unable to stand another day of typing classes and lunch with the girls, she falls to her knees, offering a quiet, almost hopeless plea for love, on any terms. Birney's Howard, stunned by this wave of unexpected, unwelcome emotion, is equally finely realized. (Birney also has another telling moment, when Howard, waiting outside for Rosemary, gazes on Madge in her bedroom window, applying makeup, creating a striking tableau of unappeased longing.) Gold has also seen to it that Picnic has a solid physical production. Andrew Lieberman's set presents the exteriors of the houses belonging to Flo and Helen; the interior of Flo's house is dressed in detail, allowing Gold to stage various bits of business inside, to be viewed through the house's windows. Oddly, Flo's house appears to be attached to an enormous metal wall upstage -- a barn? A silo? -- but this never really becomes overly distracting. David Zinn's period-perfect costumes reveal the many differences among the characters -- Picnic is a play about class, too -- and he especially dresses Grace to her best advantage, making it clear why Madge is such a universal object of desire. Jill BC Du Boff's sound design neatly blends period music -- from the radio and from a local band rehearsing -- along with birdsongs, police sirens, and other scene-setting effects. After a climactic rush of events, Picnic ends with Flo and Helen, alone on the porch, possibly alone forever. Inge allows them a quiet, and quietly devastating, exchange -- superbly played by Winningham and Burstyn -- that reveals how Flo and Madge have much more in common than we may have realized. A closeted homosexual (and alcoholic) who never achieved any personal happiness -- he killed himself at 60 -- Inge knew full well how desire can disrupt a conventional life, and he had an unusually plainspoken way of making his point. (Unlike his friend Tennessee Williams, he was a Midwesterner to the bone; florid dramatics were not for him.) Inge was never satisfied with the end of Picnic, and late in life, presented an alternative, much darker, version called Summer Brave. If he could have seen Gold's production, he might have looked at Picnic with renewed appreciation. Americans love to sentimentalize their small towns, but, as Inge knew, they could be hell on earth.--David Barbour 
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