Outlook Mostly Sunny For AACT's 'Picnic'

Outlook mostly sunny for AACT's 'Picnic'

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER

REVIEW

Playwright William Inge once described his view of human existence as a constant ritual of compromise. Reality, he said, forever subverts our dreams, and each of us must bravely settle for whatever we can scratch out of life.

This melancholy theme pervades “Picnic,” penned by Inge in 1953 and currently in revival at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre.

The setting is a pair of rural-Kansas houses whose occupants are all female. In one dwelling lives Flo Owens and her two teen-age daughters. Next door live middle-aged Helen Potts and her ancient, invalid mother.

Adjustment is the name of the game here. We learn Helen’s tyrannical mom annulled her daughter’s marriage so swiftly she’s lived her life essentially as an old maid. Flo’s husband departed long ago for reasons unexplained yet bedeviling her with lingering bitterness.

Though the women retain a healthy interest in men in this surprisingly sexual play, kindly Helen (played by Liz Foster) has clearly opted to stay with Mother. Flo (Sharon Sussman) has settled into caring for her daughters - into seeking a fit husband for pretty Madge (Rebekah Stempky) and an academic future for brainy kid sister Millie (Holly Pitrago).

Only 18, Madge already knows compromise: At Flo’s urging, she’s willing to get hitched to wealthy young suitor Alan Seymour (Derek Brantley), though Madge knows in her heart she doesn’t love him. For schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (Katherine Hinchey), a roomer at Flo’s house, compromise itself seems to have reached life-and-death proportions: She’s desperate to marry Howard Bevans (Jon Bennett), a kind yet bland store owner whom she views as her last chance to avoid spinsterhood.

Inge tosses a wild card into “Picnic’s” depressed pastorale in Hal Carter (Frank Stasio), an ex-fraternity brother of Alan’s who shows up so flat-broke he’s willing to work for food to survive. A onetime star athlete terminally down on his luck, Hal’s still the kind of macho stud who sets every female’s heart beating with lust.

Even as he flaunts his bare chest doing yard work, Hal is buried in weary self-loathing perhaps only an uncompromising love can banish. That’s why his clandestine, whirlwind romance with bedazzled Madge is enormously touching: Perhaps hope needn't be downscaled. Perhaps for the lucky ones bliss is still attainable.

Director Wendy Wright’s production largely captures both “Picnic’s” shoot-the-moon poignance and its easy-going naturalism. Stan Thornberry’s set is Kansas as all outdoors, and allows more playing space than any production I’ve seen at Civic. An actors’ director, Wright coaxes a countrified urgency from most of her performers, underscoring the notion that life is just as difficult in the middle of nowhere as in an urban jungle.

Stasio is ideal as Hal, a womanizer yearning to shake the slimy side of life. Sussman projects real fire as a mother who loves her daughters perhaps too fiercely, who’s attracted to, yet who deeply mistrusts, the opposite sex. And Hinchey will just about break your heart when her Rosemary drops her wisecracking and literally begs Howard (played with Middle-American sincerity by Bennett) to marry her.

Yet problems arise, largely ones of physical stature. Though Brantley is a fine, uptight Alan, I hold to James Earl Jones’ view on colorblind casting: It works for old classics and avant-garde - but the notion of an envied black upper-classer in ’50s rural Kansas is too jarring for Inge’s realist drama.

Then there’s the matter of Millie and Madge. To this critic’s eyes, Pitrago, not Stempky, is the true beauty and also a more spirited actress. Madge’s much-envied gorgeousness is crucial to “Picnic’s” promise of joy. Though Stempky is fine and pretty enough, Pitrago is so mercurial and vivacious one senses Millie wouldn’t merely be first in her class at Harvard, but Miss America as well.

Whoops, I don’t think we’re in Inge’s Kansas anymore.

“Picnic" will continue at 8 p.m., Thursdays-Saturdays through July 22 at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre, 2275 Platt Road. For information call 971-AACT.