New Play in Manhattan

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 by.

A good-looking, good-for-nothing roughneck (Ralph Meeker), he comes among a widow who had married unwisely for love; her two daughters, one beautiful and besought (Janice Rule), the other bright and coltishly adolescent (Kim Stanley); her boarder, an old-maid schoolteacher with an unmatrimonial-minded beau; her next-door neighbor, a middle-aged woman chained to an invalid mother. The roughneck and the beautiful girl fall hard for each other: there is a climactic scene where they dance slowly and sexually, while the other women look on--awed, envious, aroused. The fellow is sent about his business in the end, but the girl follows him.

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.

As in 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.

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