Picnic by William Inge

First published: 1953

First produced: 1953, at the Music Box Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: A small town in Kansas

Principal Characters:

• Hal Carter, a handsome drifter
• Madge Owens, an attractive but vulnerable young woman
• Millie Owens, Madge’s tomboy sister
• Flo Owens, the mother of Madge and Millie
• Alan Seymour, Hal’s rich friend and Madge’s boyfriend
• Rosemary Sydney, a spinster schoolteacher
• Howard Bevans, a businessman and bachelor
• Helen Potts, a neighbor/confidante to the Owens family

The Play

Picnic begins on a bright “sunlit” stage revealing the porches of two small houses in a small Kansas town on the late summer morning of Labor Day. All the action of the play takes place within one twenty-four-hour period. This neighborhood, like the entire town, is poised for the last summer holiday of the season, culminating in the annual Labor Day picnic before the beginning of the school year. The houses are tidy but unremarkable, except that their occupants are all women, young and old, each of whom has been seared—or scarred—in one way or another by her experiences with men. In one house lives Flo Owens, whose husband abandoned her to rear her two daughters: Madge, the “prettiest girl in town,” and Millie, a precocious, tomboyish teenager. A boarder, Rosemary Sydney, an old maid schoolteacher, also lives with them. Mrs. Potts, the friendly, harmlessly meddling neighbor in the next house, opens the play, speaking to Hal Carter, a strapping vagabond in cowboy boots, dungarees, and tee shirt.

She encourages him to let his metabolism digest the big breakfast he has eaten before he begins the chores he has contracted to do for his keep. As the first act proceeds within this matriarchal setting, each of the key characters is paraded before the audience. Flo, embittered by her years of living alone, broods over her daughters’ welfare, looking for security in Madge’s expected marriage to the stable and respectable Alan Seymour. She is wary of Hal’s presence, but accepts him because he has been presented as Alan’s former college buddy. Madge, a beautiful young woman, is the captive of a beauty that breeds resentment in her sister, fear in her mother, and adulation and lust in the young men of her town. Millie, a self-styled intellectual at age sixteen, smokes in secret and expresses disdain for her sister’s beauty and femininity. Rosemary Sydney is, on the surface, prim but is inwardly a bawdy, frustrated woman whose longing for male companionship and marriage consumes her and compels her to grasp for attention from any man, whether Hal or businessman Howard Bevans.

Hal, vigorous and vital, signals early in the play what is absent in the Owens household; yet at the same time, Hal is also depicted as an unwelcome intruder into this small community—an appealing masculine specimen whose virility is a vivid contrast to the personalities and lifestyle of the two other prominent men in the play: Alan Seymour, his friend from college, and Howard Bevans, an aging businessman. While Hal is impulsive and uncouth, Alan is a cautious, unprepossessing young man destined for both goodness and greatness; he treats Madge with unadorned awe and reverence. To him, she is a goddess who deserves nothing but unalloyed tenderness and grace; he thinks of her not sexually but as the prototypical nice girl. Howard, on the other hand, is a bumbling but benevolent soul who prizes bachelorhood and independence.

As act 2 begins, picnic plans are evolving and the ensemble awaits departure time while the conversation turns on Hal’s past, Millie’s intellectualism, and Howard’s noticing Rosemary’s shapely legs—and Rosemary’s drawing attention to Hal’s. Meanwhile, Hal, much traveled and variously occupied since his college days with Alan, becomes the designated escort for Millie, though he secretly desires to be close to Madge. His outward bravado is eventually mitigated by his admission to Alan that he does not know how to act around women, a fact confirmed by his inability to divert the aggressive flirtation of Rosemary. When she tries to coerce him into dancing with her, Hal, embarrassed and perplexed, refuses and thereby incurs Rosemary’s wrath. Humiliated, she accuses him of arrogance and chauvinism, rebuking him with the stinging charge that he came from the gutter and will return to it.

When Flo bursts in and surveys the scene, she forbids any more drinking and tells Millie to ride to the picnic with Alan, Mrs. Potts, and herself, while Madge is left to go with Rosemary and Howard. Rosemary, stunned by Hal’s rejection and her sudden feelings of ineptitude, persuades Howard to take her driving “into sunset,” thus skipping the picnic. Act 2 ends with Madge and Hal alone onstage, revealing their private, secret troubles—Hal his reform school past, Madge her weariness with being told that she is pretty—and frankly expressing their desire for each other. Madge abruptly kisses Hal, and he declares that they will not go to the picnic either.

Act 3 brings all the principals together to thrash out the implications of the various couplings that have occurred. Shortly after midnight, Howard and Rosemary return to the Owens residence, having made love. Coerced by circumstances in some ways beyond his control, Howard awkwardly tries to say good night, but Rosemary pleads with him to take her with him. He declines, but she persists in extracting his reluctant promise to return in the morning to take her off to get married. The scene shifts outside to the porch, where Hal and Madge have returned, suddenly very conscious of their predicament: how to explain to Alan, Flo, and Millie where they have been. As Hal attempts one more embrace, the curtain closes on a distraught Madge, unable to reconcile what she has done with the mundane activities and obligations she must face in the morning, and Hal, beating his fists together for the reckless bad faith with which he has treated the Owens home and his erstwhile friend Alan.

The sun rises on the doorstep in the play’s last scene. Millie smokes a cigarette, prepared for the first day of school. One by one, the neighborhood residents saunter by, and there is a flutter of speculation among Flo, Mrs. Potts, and Millie over the previous night’s events and what transpired between Madge and Hal. Into the midst of this comes Rosemary, bounding down the stairs, asking if anyone has seen Howard, with her immediate audience—including her sister schoolteachers who have come by to pick her up—unaware of what commitments were made in the night. A shivaree, or spontaneous wedding party, erupts when Howard arrives and Rosemary exults in her exit: “She got her a man.”

Alan enters and, after pleasantries exchanged with Millie, confronts Madge, apologizing for Hal’s behavior while completely exonerating Madge, and then promising that Hal will never bother her again. In his blind adoration of Madge, he is unable to see her as anything but chaste and victimized. Madge, noncommittal, expresses vague disappointment in what is happening to her. In the confusion of Howard and Rosemary’s departure, Hal sneaks onto the scene and reports that he is urgently headed for a freight train to Tulsa to avoid the police whom Alan has called, accusing Hal of car theft. Alan spots Hal, and after brief fisticuffs between the two, he concedes that he has been bested by Hal; he recognizes that Madge will never be his and leaves. To Flo’s dismay, Hal and Madge express their love for each other, and Hal begs Madge to come with him. As Hal flees, Madge runs to the house, emerging moments later with a packed suitcase, determined to follow Hal. Flo discerns that her daughter is following the same path that she herself had taken and pleads with her to stop. With the open approval of Mrs. Potts, Madge leaves, and the play ends with Flo wishing she had had the time to share with Madge her faltering motherly wisdom.

Dramatic Devices

Picnic, in common with all of Inge’s plays, does not draw its strength from innovative staging or some imaginative reversal of the conventions of the theater. Inge’s dramatic instrument was instead the steady, relentless, and well-focused depiction of the everyday as manifested in the small town of the Midwest. Just as his friend and fellow playwright Tennessee Williams evoked the South, Inge wrote to bring his native midwestern landscapes to life through the strong characterization of individual lives. The action and intrigue of one day in the waning summer of a small Kansas town are both the setting and substance of Picnic, a testimony to and a revelation of what Inge regarded as both “the sweetness of character” and the unarticulated tensions of the tortured midwestern soul.

The composition of Picnic began as a tableau, a series of character sketches of five women in small-town Kansas titled “Front Porch,” which then evolved into a more developed play, Summer Brave, and finally into Picnic. Its evolution from these vignettes of characterization is clearly evident in the strong individualistic portrayal of the women in Picnic. Inge, as many critics have observed, had an uncanny insight into the psychological processes of the female mind, and he used that capability to create realistic dialogue, especially in the scenes that occur in the Owens household among an all-woman entourage. Madge, in particular, stands out as one only too trapped by her own beauty and the appearance of tranquillity of spirit.

The small midwestern town thus emerges in Picnic almost as a character itself; the ordinariness is palpable, the ever-present front porch is, in the morning, a symbol of gateways and pathways unexplored, of conversations destined to demarcate the premature endings, never the beginnings, of romance and adventure. These same porches at evening—shadowed and cloaked in diminishing sunlight—betray the final resting place of nostalgic glances back to what was not and never could have been, and the inevitable winter of discontent to follow. Only Madge’s sudden, joyful decision to join Hal—against her mother’s fervent protests—breaks the chilly atmosphere of sameness and safety. However, clearly Inge had an affection for these towns, referring to them in his other writings not as “flat,” a pejorative stereotype of unrelenting dullness, but as “level,” a place where a man or woman can get his bearings straight before embarking on a more ambitious task. This “levelness” is conveyed in Picnic by the barren stage, uncluttered by anything but the most homely of artifacts and images.

Critical Context

Picnic was Inge’s second consecutive successful Broadway play, following on the heels of his debut work, Come Back, Little Sheba (pr., pb. 1950). Picnic, like each play in the quartet of Inge’s well-received Broadway productions of the 1950’s—also including Bus Stop (pr., pb. 1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (pr., pb. 1957)—is quintessentially a play about midwestern life—about its everydayness, its sense of sameness, directionlessness, and about the tension between men and women, loners all, who face their lives with a combination of resignation, despair, and lonely isolation. Robert Baird Shuman, speaking of this run of successes, suggested that “critics could do little but marvel at the success of a man who wrote modest plays about the most prosaic of people, but who had never experienced a box office failure.”

That string of successes, however, ended at the close of the 1950’s, as a series of Inge’s plays, beginning with A Loss of Roses (pr. 1959, pb. 1960), was savaged by critics who found Inge not as effective a playwright when he left behind consideration of the midwestern malaise he knew so well. After the production of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, it was only in his screenplay for the motion picture Splendor in the Grass (1961), an Academy Award winner for original screenplay, that Inge achieved critical success. In Picnic, however, Inge was at the peak of his talent; Robert Brustein saw it as a “satyr play glorifying the phallic male,” and it was made into a highly popular film—as were each of the other three in the midwestern quartet of plays.

In the context of American theater, Inge’s work may be compared with that of Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, whose regional settings parallel in power those of Inge’s Midwest. However, Inge’s own imaginative powers fall short of O’Neill and Williams in considering the larger themes of modern American life. If it can be said that great playwrights universalize the particular while good playwrights particularize the universal, Inge is decidedly a good playwright, one whose depiction of the longing of the human heart for meaningful companionship and a sense of destiny in Picnic is close to being the perfect metaphor for postwar listlessness and anxiety. At the time of its original staging, the urban, global village of the future was yet to arise, and Inge’s small-town America only beginning to vanish. The increasing isolation of the rural, nonindustrial America from the metropolises and its effects on the inhabitants of small towns is mirrored no better than in the characters of Picnic. Without Inge it is quite likely that the reality of the American Midwest and the inner lives of its people would never have been brought to the attention of twentieth century theater audiences and filmgoers. For that achievement alone, Inge holds a special place in American drama.

Sources for Further Study

Armato, Philip M. “The Bum as Scapegoat in William Inge’s Picnic.” Western American Literature 10 (Winter, 1976): 273-282.

Brustein, Robert. “The Men-Taming Women of William Inge.” Harper’s Magazine, November, 1958, 53-57.

Diehl, Digby. “Interview with William Inge.” In Behind the Scenes: Theater and Film Interviews from the Transatlantic Review, edited by Joseph McCrindle. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.

Gould, Jean. “William Inge.” In Modern American Playwrights. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966.

Leeson, Richard M. William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Lumley, Frederick. “William Inge.” In New Trends in Twentieth Century Drama: A Survey Since Ibsen and Shaw. 4th rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

McClure, Arthur F. William Inge: A Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1982.

Miller, Jordan Y. “William Inge.” In Reference Guide to American Literature. 2d ed. Chicago: St. James, 1987.

Shuman, Robert Baird. William Inge. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Wolfson, Lester M. “Inge, O’Neill, and the Human Condition.” Southern Speech Journal 20 (Summer, 1957): 225-226.