A Hot Time, Guaranteed

A hot time, guaranteed

Civic stages Inge's lusty classic drama 'Picnic'

By ANNE SHARP
NEWS SPECIAL WRITER

PREVIEW

On a steaming summer day in a small Kansas town circa 1953, a group of wistful, unattached ladies gather on their porches. An attractive young male stranger who is doing a little yard work for them, strips off his shirt.

Well, it’s hot.

“When anybody asks me what the play’s about, I tell them it’s about sex - which it is. It’s about sex in the ’50s,” Wendy L. Wright says of William Inge’s “Picnic,” opening Thursday in an Ann Arbor Civic Theater production.

Or, as Inge’s antihero Hal Carter, the man with the interesting chest, remarks to a friend, “Women are gettin’ desperate, Seymour.” Bad-boy Hal (played in the Civic production by Frank Stasio) is equipped to stir up the local female population in a way homegrown men like Hal’s friend Alan Seymour (Derrick Brantley), just can’t.

Among those variously amused, impressed, or troubled by Hal’s pectorals are gentle matrons Helen (Liz Foster) and Flo (Sharon Sussman), creepy-repressed schoolteacher Rosemary (Katherine Hinchey), baby beatnik Millie (Holly Pitrago), and - most ominously - Alan’s steady girl, Madge (Rebekah Stempkey).

“The play, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was quite well-received when it first came out,” says Wright, AACT administrative manager as well as director of the upcoming production. “In some ways it was probably one of the first plays that was dealing with the issue of lust, and where that can take you.

“Inge called it a ‘summer romance,’ and so I’ve been publicizing it that way,” Wright added. “On the surface it appears to be a great date-type play, and it is. But there’s more to it than that.”

Wright noted that in the ’50s, Inge, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were considered the Big Three in American theater. “A lot of people consider that Inge has faded (the most) over the years, and I don’t think that’s true at all,” she said. “I think ‘Picnic’ and ‘Bus Stop’ are extraordinary.”

In addition to those two works, Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Dark at the Top of the Stairs” also are “absolute standards” of American repertory, plays that people “really should come out to see, because this is what American theater is all about,” Wright said.

Music provides a vital strand in the sensual texture of “Picnic.” The most famous scene in Joshua Logan’s 1955 film version is William Holden’s Hal’s goofy, sexy jazz dance with Kim Novak’s Madge. A recent New York revival of the play made that dance its carefully choreographed focal point.

In deciding on musical accompaniment for the AACT production, Wright enlisted a local individual who keeps a database of music from the 1930s through the 1950s. “You can say any week from any year, and he can bring it up on his computer and tell you what the 10 or 12 top songs were that week,” Wright said. “So I’ve been working with him to come up with songs that were very timely for the time period.

“Of course, this was 1953, which was not the most interesting year in music because it’s just before rock and roll, and after the ’40s stuff that everybody knows so well," Wright said. “The music was very schmaltzy and romantic, and somehow I think that’s very fitting for this production.”

Simmering weather conditions have loaded a new problem onto the shoulders of the Civic. Ask audience members who sweltered through “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” staged at the AACT Playhouse by the Jewish Community Center of Washtenaw County.

Two aging air-conditioning units on the Playhouse roof gave out during the production run of the Neil Simon comedy-drama. That left the AACT with the dilemma of financing replacement units costing $30,000 in time for “Picnic.”

Wright assures audiences they can expect to enjoy “Picnic” in comfort, since AACT has reserved a phalanx of mega-fans from Action Rental just in case.

Still, she laughed, “if you’re gonna have to sit in the heat, this is the play you’re gonna want to watch. Because, let me tell you, when this guy takes his shirt off, the temperature’s going to rise anyway.”

Ann Arbor Civic Theatre presents William Inge's "Picnic" at 8 p.m., Thursdays-Saturdays through July 22 at the AACT Playhouse, 2275 Platt Road. Admission is $8. For reservations and information, call 971-AACT.

Frank Stasio stars as Hal Carter and Rebekah Stempky as Madge Owens in the AACT production of 'Picnic/ opening Thursday.

'It's about sex in the '50s,' director Wendy L. Wright says of the William Inge classic.