Out to Lunch

Picnic

Written by William Inge

Directed by Jennifer Harris

At the Winthrop House JCR

Through this weekend

REMEMBER that picnic in the woods you planned? It sounded fun--until you got there. Remember the hot sun warming up the soda, the ants crawling on the food and the grass blades practicing acupuncture on your back?

Well, that's exactly what Picinic is: a prickly, tepid and altogether irritating play about growing up in the Midwest. And the actors strut across the stage as if they've had too much sun.

Written by William Inge (Bus Stop), the play attempts to recreate life in a small Kansas town in the 1950s. But to a modern audience, the script seems little more than an inept recapitulation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, without any of the characteristics that have made that play endure.

Director Jennifer Harris chose a crude set for the play that appropriately looks as prefab as the houses that the play's characters inhabit--and the characters themselves.

As Picnic opens, everybody is busily preparing for the town's annual picnic when a stranger comes to town. He's tall and handsome, and his arrival ends up disrupting one family, one friendship and two love affairs.

Ethan Herschenfeld plays this galumphing giant (Hal Carter), who attracts the attention of Madge and Millie Owens. But the only attention he's likely to attract from the audience is bound to be negative. Herschenfeld's movements are stiff and graceless, and his voice wavers over important lines.

While enjoying the ogles of Madge. Millie and their boarder Rosemary Sydney (Martha Redding), he runs into estranged best friend Alan Seymour (Jeremy Miller)--who just happens to live in the town. The two engage in a mock battle that is at first painful to watch but is ultimately just ridiculous.

But Alan and Hal have a falling out after Hal attracts the attention of Madge (Leslie Powell), who is Alan's girlfriend Those who have seen Powell before will be disappointed with her unremarkable performance in Picnic.

As little sister Millie, Tracey Roberts fares slightly better. She looks the image of a down-home girl, gawky in overalls but smart enough to win a college scholarship. When she complains that her sister gets everything she wants because she is pretty and Millie isn't, it seems real.

Roberts even picks up on Picnic's comic elements, though not as well as Marjorie Ingall, who plays the middle-aged next door neighbor. In a play where the word "costume" means jeans or a flower-patterned dress, it should not be surprising that the audience can almost see the powder falling from her grey hair. Though after working with this cast, one might expect her hair to fall out.

The funniest thing in the play is when one of the characters sees Millie reading Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe and warns her mother of its pernicious content. But Millie is saved by Alan, who tells the mother that the book is on the reading list for the modern novel course at his college. Alas, even the play's overt humor eludes the cast.

Picnic is a play that has little to recommend it. Despite its bland script and spiceless acting, it's as likely to cause indigestion as a jalapeno sundae.