Picnic

Here’s an American myth. A handsome drifter finds himself in a small midwestern town in the late 1940’s and, as might be expected, the world changes a little for eveyone who meets him. Of course, it’s Kansas, that magical state where a tornado can land you in Oz. In Picnic the tornado is Hal, and he lands almost everyone he meets in a lot of trouble. Madge falls for him–and that’s trouble because she’s going steady with Alan who turns out to have known Hal when he was a star football player at college. Madge’s mother has a schoolteacher as a boarder who knows that she is getting old but wants, so desperately, to marry. This is a haunting play about love, half-remembered picnics when the weather was thick with summer, leaving home, and not wanting to grow old.