In sultry ‘Picnic’ at APT, sparks fly on a summer night

The Capital Times | Lindsay Christians | July 1, 2025

The phrase “pretty privilege” would sound foreign to the people of “Picnic,” set in a small Kansas town in the 1950s.

But Madge would know what it means. She’d understand that she has it, and she’d hate it.

“Maybe I get tired being looked at,” Madge tells her mother. And later: “Lots of the time I wonder if I really exist.”

“Picnic,” William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1953 play, is so much about looking, about shiny surfaces and darker depths. Maybe it’s odd to think of a story set in a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business as being so much about performance, but so it is.

American Players Theatre, which produces “Picnic” through Sept. 13, turns the Hill stage into a shared backyard. Takeshi Kata’s design brings midcentury shades of “All My Sons” and Tennessee Williams, with peeling porch paint and every bush in bloom.

It’s Labor Day in Kansas, sticky and stagnant, when Hal Carter (Rasell Holt, smoldering) comes to town. Helen Potts (Dee Dee Batteast, fanning herself for many reasons) gives him pie for breakfast, throws some odd jobs his way and takes his shirt. For, ahem, cleaning.

Read the full review here.