a utopian revisioning
of a small-town american dystopia
by Douglas Messerli
William Inge Picnic, directed by John
Farmanesh-Bocca; the production I saw was at The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Los
Angeles, April 2, 2023
It may be odd, but certainly is predictable,
that gay playwright William Inge spent most of his life writing about
heterosexual relationships in small town America, particularly from the
viewpoint of women. In the 1950s when Inge was at his best, few stage dramas
and no movie could discuss homosexuality
All of his figures suffer instead the mid-twentieth century American
angst about class, identity, and sex while outwardly supporting and sustaining
the very forces which are the causes of their inner suffering. In Picnic
the females include an elderly woman, Helen Potts (Rosemary Thomas in the
current stage production), whose long-ago marriage was nullified by her
dominating mother for whom she is still caring, and whose sexual life, in
effect, has been terminated at an early age. It is no wonder that throughout
the play she is fearless about inviting young men to “tromp” through her house
and is the most encouraging character in the play for sexual encounters,
particular with handsome outsiders. Her
next-door neighbor Flo Owens (Yolanda Snowball), on the other hand, has been in
love and raised two daughters, but has been seriously hurt and damaged by her
husband’s extramarital affairs which ended with his leaving her; it is
inevitable perhaps that she seeks a seemingly “model” husband for her beautiful
but not intellectually talented daughter, Madge (Mattie Harris Lowe in the
production I saw), who, despite Flo’s moral scruples, she almost pushes to
become more sexually involved so that the boy, Alan Seymour (Ahkei Togun), son
of the wealthiest man in town, will quickly marry her before her beauty fades
as she feels her own has, helping to cause the breakup of her marriage.
The
boarder in her house, the school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Sydney A. Mason) is
perhaps the best example of this small-town hypocrisy. As a teacher she
pretends to keep the highest of moral standards, but as a woman she is
desperate in her middle-age to find a husband and willing to do nearly anything
to push even the man she doesn’t truly love, Howard Bevans (Derrick Parker),
into marriage. She is the most openly conflicted person in the play, attacking
those who drink while secretly imbibing and enjoying it, even to the point of
becoming rather drunk at the picnic. She makes a desperate pass at a younger
man who, when he rejects her blatant sexual advances, attacks him as a sexual
degenerate the moment after she has ripped off his shirt, accidently on purpose
so that she might get one last glimpse of his rippling abs. She is desperate
and sad in the pulls her society has demanded of her, displaying a horrific
schizophrenia of church-going spinster and a sexually needy woman.
Flo’s younger daughter Millie (Symphony Canady), an intelligent, curious
young good-looking teenager who is beginning to realize that it is time for her
to begin wearing dresses and dating young men, is equally confused by her
tomboyish behavior, her dislike of all the young boys in her town, and her
longings to leave and become a writer like the woman whose book, The Ballad
of the Sad Café, she she currently reading, Carson McCullers. Inge codes
this young girl as a future lesbian without needing to say a word about her
sexual proclivities of which even she is still unaware.
And finally, there is Madge, the most beautiful girl in town, a not
terribly bright woman who, nonetheless, is tired of being merely the subject of
the male gaze, and auditioning for the role of a future trophy wife that has no
meaning other than through her physical appearance. She goes along with the
path chosen for her by her own mother and the community at large, winning
beauty contests such as the Neewollah Queen (Halloween spelled backwards, an
interesting commentary about all of these Labor Day events), and making herself
pretty, but is exhausted in seeking who she herself might truly be, while at
the same time representing the essence of an insider, beloved by all.
None of these women is happy, but then neither are the men of the
community, even if Inge does not bother to explore most of their personalities
in depth.
The local paperboy Bomber (Rogelio Douglas III) would be a lover but hasn’t
the looks, brains, nor personality to be anything other than the loud-mouthed
challenger he feels compelled to portray.
Bevans is perhaps the most well-adjusted of all the characters—except
for the fact that as a meek business man who has enjoyed the company of
Rosemary, he lets himself be bullied into marriage simply to qualm her mid-life
desperation.
Even the wealthy young Alan Seymour realizes that no matter how well he
achieves he will never be important in his father’s eyes, who likes prizes and
contests, the richest man in the world, the best football scorer, the Queen of
Neewollah, etc.
The outsider to this community, and a threat as any stranger has long
posed to small, rural cities and towns throughout history, is the most
angst-ridden of all. Hal Carter (Monti D. Washington) may have been once known
as the best college football player of his day, but he comes from not only what
is often described as “the wrong side of the tracks”—which given the barriers
of small-town USA, even the Owens’ and Potts’ small, white-framed houses are
clearly located compared with the Seymour mansion—but from a dysfunctional
family in which the father was alcoholic and his mother involved with another
man. He himself was arrested and sent way to reform school for stealing a ride
on someone else’s motorcycle. And like Madge, he is not intellectually gifted,
having flunked out of college. Only for a few years of fraternity life, when
star football players are given permission to share quarters with wealthy frat
boys when he met Seymour, has Hal lived in a world of permission, and even then,
he was disliked for being a braggart.
Since
there Hal has attempted to get a job in Hollywood, worked as a farmhand, and
bummed around the country surviving through part-time jobs without ever being
able to find something might make him feel the glory he was awarded between the
football game goal posts. Hal, in short, is the all-American boy-man that constitutes
so very much of the stereotype of the US male, the prom-King in high school who
lives the rest of his life as kind of Willy Loman traveling salesman or serves
out his sentence of adulthood as a janitor with a household of four or five
children, the only difference being this man has had no high school days and no
woman who has wanted him except women like the two he has met along the way,
who engage him in sex and steal all his hard-earned wages.
In
short, Inge’s characters are all standard small-town stereotypes of the day. I
was going to add the word “small-town white stereotypes” because this
playwright’s small Kansas communities are just that, small towns such as those
in which Joshua Logan’s movie version of the play was filmed—Hutchinson,
Halsted, Nickerson, Salina, and Sterling—white communities where very few
blacks existed in the 1950s. Which brings us to the central issue of this
particular all-black production, directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca, the son of
an exiled Iranian General.
Let me begin by saying that I always look forward to racial and gender
switches in the productions of classic dramatic theater—and directors and
actors have felt free to make just such kinds of changes in my own plays
(written under the name Kier Peters)—because of the new insights with which
they provide us. And certainly, by casting the major character of this play, an
outsider football hero who seems always on the run from the police, desperate
to arrest him for the very slightest of infractions, a black man gives an
entirely new dimension to the character. We can understand, far better than we
ever might have comprehended why William Holden can’t keep a job and is hounded
out of nearly town he visits, when the character is portrayed by a figure—even
more trim and muscularly well-developed than the 1955 shirtless Holden—such as
this work’s Monti Washington.
As
a black man his role is no more stereotyped that it was in the original, and it
makes far more sense. Indeed, it might have been even more interesting if Hal’s
character might have been the only black figure of this production, where the
trope of the dangerous “white gaze” upon the beautiful black male might have
been truly explored in a manner in which it seldom has been in modern US
literature.
While we know that black individuals suffer all the fears and emotions
expressed in this work, in 1953, the date of this play—the same year of the
Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, the first major boycott of an urban bus system, and
Jackie Robinson, signing with the Dodgers, became the first black player of the
Major Leagues—I might suggest that most of the black community’s attentions
were not focused on the relatively minor melodramatic sufferings of these
characters. While as Farmanesh-Bocca argues, blacks were deeply contributing to
the US that became an economic superpower, it is hard to imagine their
collection consciousness being focused on the sexual and class faux pas of a handsome
outsider and a beautiful insider of their local community. And no small
midwestern town that I know of in 1953 had given permission to the range of wealth
and acceptance to blacks as we witness in this stage production in the
character of Madge’s beau and Hal’s college friend Seymour.
Yet the actors of this work are all quite wonderful in their roles and
totally convincing. And if you can ignore all the historically anachronistic
details, this director’s Picnic is just that, a joyful celebration of
young love that wins out over all the adult strictures and consternation.
In
an interview with the director with Shari Barrett, Farmanesh-Bocca suggests
that he has always felt “on the other side of the glass looking in” upon
American culture, and as a kind of tourist to the American experience he has
spent much of his career exploring what US culture truly is. He explains that
he loved a country that he never felt particularly loved him in return.
And
in that context, we can see this production as a kind of Utopian vision of what
US experience should be, a world in which we can explore the mid-50s psyche of
blacks much in the same way that the country gave permission to playwrights
such as Inge, who despite having his own roots in just such small Kansas towns,
because of his sexuality was exploring a world from which he equally stood
outside, heterosexual love.
Finally, from such an expected shift of viewpoint we do indeed suddenly
get a new perspective. What if these small rural midwestern towns were made up
primarily of blacks? As a friend who joined me at this event commented upon
leaving the theater, “It turns out nothing is basically any different.” As the
director himself comments: “The play, in the hands of a black cast, rang like a
bell. Rather than narrowing the scope of the play, it only expanded the scope
of the story of America, inviting us all to celebrate how unique and similar
our human experiences are.”
If
Picnic is a play has long seemed dated, in this production it has been
given new life and new meaning in its exploration of black identity, love, and
class relationships in the heart of the heart of the country that never but
should have existed.
Los Angeles, April 6, 2023
