Picnic (Criticism)

Criticism

Sheri E. Metzger

Metzger is a Ph.D. specializing in literature and drama at the University of New Mexico. In this essay, she discusses the manner in which Inge’s play forecasted future trends in sexuality, particularly with regard to women in the entertainment world.

At the end of Picnic, Madge packs her bags and leaves town to follow Hal. But this was not the ending that Inge originally envisioned when he wrote the play. The playwright’s initial view of love was much darker and not so easily reconciled, and he left Madge to continue much as she had before Hal’s arrival — minus the security of her relationship with Alan. The 1953 stage director, Joshua Logan, wanted, and received, a happier ending, but Inge’s original conclusion reappeared in a rewrite of Picnic, published in 1962 as Summer Brave. Inge’s desire to portray young love as sexually charged and rebellious revealed an America hidden behind the perfect world so often depicted in 1950s entertainment, a world that would further reveal itself in the films, music, and plays of the coming decades.

While ignoring the realities of the Cold War, the Korean Conflict, and other prevalent threats of the era, television and film generally tried to convey American life as romantic, carefree, and lighthearted, subscribing to an unwritten code of conduct. As depicted on Broadway in the 1950s, Picnic suitably reflected those ideals. When Madge leaves for a life with Hal, she bolsters the idea that sexuality, though wrong in a premarital situation, is a prelude to marriage. The ending that Inge initially envisioned, however, more accurately reflected the America of the late-1960s, a country where women did not always fulfill society’s expectations of proper behavior. In Summer Brave, Inge implies that Madge is no worse for having spent a night with Hal, and that her experience does not lead to promiscuity or a lower station in life. But in the early-1950s, single women who engaged in sex were expected to marry their lover or face a life of social damnation.

Inge first challenged this restrictive social edict three years earlier in Come Back, Little Sheba. In that play, the character Marie uses a boy named Turk solely as a sexual partner, a plaything, one whom she has no interest in marrying. Turk does not represent Marie’s future, but he is an interesting diversion while she waits for the marriage with the man she truly desires. In this instance, sex is divorced from both love and marriage. The idea that sex might not lead naturally to marriage resurfaces in the original Picnic, when Madge chooses to remain behind after Hal leaves. Had director Logan left that last act intact, the audience would have seen two very different endings evolve from similar experiences. Instead, the conventions of sexuality and marriage are maintained for both couples; Rosemary and Howard will marry and an eventual union is implied for Hal and Madge.

Inge uses Rosemary’s story to provide the conventional ending in Picnic, the one expected by a 1950s audience. After she and Howard engage in drunken sex, Rosemary insists that Howard do the honorable thing and marry her. Her entrapment of the reluctant suitor provides much of the comedy in the play. With that couple’s romantic plot, Inge is using the comedic formula adapted by William Shakespeare in so many of his comedies, when, after a suggestion of sexual misconduct, the woman and man are wed in the play’s happy conclusion. Rosemary and Howard are unconventional lovers, both older and yet both naively expecting a different outcome from their tryst: Rosemary expects a more romantic Howard, one who wants to marry her while Howard expects that nothing has changed and that Rosemary will simply continue dating him. Instead, Rosemary seizes upon Howard as the only opportunity she will have for marriage.

R. Baird Shuman stated in William Inge that Rosemary reaches out “pitifully toward Howard, not because she really loves him, but because she fears she will continue to live her life ‘till I’m ready for the grave and don’t have anyone to take me there.’” Howard underestimates Rosemary’s desperation for marriage and the fact that he is her sole marital target. While funny, this element of comedy is also tragic, in that it reveals all of Rosemary’s insecurities and fears and makes clear the stereotype that she represents: the spinster schoolteacher, too unattractive to marry and resigned to a lifetime of devotion to her students. Their romance contrasts with the Madge/Hal relationship, which deviated from the expected in Inge’s original ending. When the playwright changed the ending to fit Logan’s vision, he not only reaffirmed traditional expectations of conventional comedic theatre but also rendered Picnic as a non-threatening social commentary.

Jane Courant argued in Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present that these romances represent much more than “faithful renderings of cliches of culture, language, and behavior during a period characterized by extreme social conformity.” She reminded readers that Inge’s plays almost predicts the changes that would come in film and music in the next few years. The advent of films depicting freedom-craving bad boys like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Peter Fonda seems to echo Hal’s observations about his theft of a motorcycle. Hal stole the motorcycle because he “wanted to get on the damn thing and go so far away, so fast, that no one’d ever catch up with me.” The motorcycle is a symbol of freedom, a means for escape, rebellion, and adventure — all things that Hal needs to survive. These are the same elements that motivate the film rebels of Brando’s The Wild One (1954), Dean’s Rebel without A Cause (1955), and Fonda’s Easy Rider (1969). Just as importantly, they are the same needs that appeal to Madge, who finds Hal’s story romantically exciting. When she says, “I think — lots of boys feel that way at times,” she is also silently adding — and girls, too.

The sexuality of music and dance that Inge incorporates into Act II establishes the mood for the sexual encounters that follow. When Hal begins to dance with Madge, the act is seductive, as Inge intended it to be. His stage directions refer to their dance as a “primitive rite that would mate the two young people.” Inge is confirming that music and dance can serve as a prelude to physical love, planting the seed of fear that would flower in many parents’ suspicions of teenagers and rock and roll. Courant wrote that a year after Picnic opened in 1953, the first volley of rock and roll songs, by such artists as Bill Haley and the Comets, would shake the world of popular music; Elvis Presley’s subsequent arrival would herald a new era of sexuality in music. Hal’s appropriation of music and dance as foreplay is a prologue to the pattern that would be established in the “teenybopper” films of such entertainers as Presley, Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello. In these films, young people were brought together through music and dance, and while these movies are chaste in comparison to the explicit films of later decades, the implication of sex was very clear. Inge used Madge and Hal to establish a picture of youthful love and sexuality that was just on the horizon.

In an interview that he gave to writer Walter Wager in The Playwrights Speak, Inge said that he was not a social activist and that he thought very little in political terms. Yet later, in the same interview, he stated that he saw a new generation of American youth “challenging the cliches of the established culture . . . [and] creating cliches of their own.” It is this questioning of convention that Inge tries to capture in his play. Madge rejects the image of beauty that encapsulates her life. She wants to be noticed and admired for qualities that have nothing to do with her appearance. She also wants more than the American Dream marriage ideal that her mother envisions in a union with Alan. She recognizes her intellectual limitations and laments her future as a clerk; it is her jealousy of Millie’s academic achievements that creates much of the sisterly conflict in the play. But while Madge may be less intellectual than her younger sister, she is pragmatic. At the play’s ending, when Madge is challenged by her mother, Madge tells her that she does not believe that loving Hal will provide all the answers. She acknowledges Hal’s poor record with women and his lack of economic prospects.

Madge’s awareness of the love’s limitations contradicts critic Gerald Weales’s appraisal of Picnic in American Drama since World War II. Weales argued that “the prevailing message of the play is that love is a solution to all social, economic, and psychological problems.” Certainly this is not true of the original ending that Inge intended for his play, but even the sanitized Broadway version permits Madge to raise doubts about her future, serving up a cynical view of love and its power to solve problems. When Flo tells Madge that Hal “will never be able to support you . . . he’ll spend all his money on booze. After a while there’ll be other women,” Madge replies, “I’ve thought of all those things.” Isolated in this last scene, these words indicate that Madge is rejecting reality in favor of romance, but that perception ignores Madge’s earlier expressions, her stated desire to leave town and find freedom. It ignores her longing glances toward the train and her fear that all the town has to offer is a lifetime of clerking in a small store. This information makes Madge’s decision to follow Hal far more plausible. To her, Hal represents the best opportunity for escape from the nothingness of small town life, from an existence based solely on beauty. At the beginning of the play, Madge is, indeed, “marking time,” as Ima Honaker Herron noted in the Southwest Review, she is waiting for something better to come along. By the end of the third act, she has found that something. In leaving she is taking a chance, but she is also hoping to insure that she will not end up one of the lonely, aimless women of this small Kansas town. She has escaped.

Source: Sheri E. Metzger, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” published in 1681, is an early poem that argues that time is fleeting and that young lovers should seize the opportunity to be happy together, especially with respect to sexual intimacy; and “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time,” a short poem written by Robert Herrick in 1648, that warns young women to marry quickly rather than wait for the perfect mate
• Splendor in the Grass is a film written by Inge. Released in 1961, the film focuses on the love affair between a young teenage couple who cannot deal well with the sexual pressure and family interference that beset them.
• Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, published in 1925, explores the tragedy of young love when social status and economic gain push a young man to commit a horrible crime.
• Bus Stop, written by Inge in 1955, is considered by many to be the playwright’s finest comedy. In the play the young lovers’ theme takes on a new twist when a naive young man attempts to force a reluctant young woman to be his wife.