Picnic Director's Notes

William Inge, from Kansas, always felt to me like he was someone who lived in the town I grew up in in Iowa. It even felt as if we grew up at the same time, though he was born 50 years before me. I always wondered why. Maybe it’s because there are very few American playwrights who write about the Midwest - the small town, the “small people.” Maybe it’s because his sympathies with the mundane never made me feel embarrassed by my humble Midwestern beginnings. Regardless, he clearly understood the gifts that came along with this kind of life. But he never sugar-coated that life either—the abiding boredom of such places. The Midwest. The Flyover States. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, they were decidedly NOT Illinois, or even Minnesota or Wisconsin. Just ask anybody from Illinois.

Maybe the bond I feel is that I believe he understood intrinsically the utter exhilaration of a root beer float on the way home from the pool; running wild after dark in the yard with your friends playing red light, green light until the grass is wet under your feet and you know it is well past bedtime, or meeting your boyfriend in the bean field to be alone for the few minutes you wouldn’t be missed by mom. Inge understood that a lifetime of these moments...well, they make up a life. And the hope is that just maybe, those moments will happen again.

Picnic hovers in a haze of waiting, a time full of anticipation...of a sustained longing. Of bread dough rising overnight, of three-inch catalogues with a four month wait for Christmas, of hoping to wear your Easter shoes early. A feeling that can keep you alive. Or slowly dismantle you.

Inge grew up in a boarding house run by his mother and was in the company of three women, much like the ladies in Picnic. “I saw their attempts (at happiness), and, even as a child, I sensed every woman’s failure. I began to sense their sorrow and the emptiness of their lives, and it touched me.” Quiet daily life can have a loud desperation. Loud worry. Loud silent dreams.

The beautiful women of Picnic, in an attempt to resist this desperation, craft their own community. In their backyards they curate a world of family order, simplicity and self-assured practicality. Abiding by the rules of living pragmatically they remain earthbound. Dreams are kept in check. Dreams are for the children. And understanding deep down that hope rests with them.

- Brenda DeVita, Director of Picnic