Picnic

 

Costume Designs by Kelsey Hunt

 

1950s Americana–Celebrities, Cars and Kansas

Dramaturg Drew Barker has compiled a number of interesting links about life in the 1950s from some great sources. Click here to learn more about the world of Picnic.

 

Program Notes by Drew Barker

William Inge (1913-1973)

William Inge’s heart is just beneath the surface in all of his plays. His most famous characters and stories are all firmly set in America’s heartland.

Courtesy of The William Inge Collection, Independence Community College, Independence, Kansas William Inge: A Bibliography; Garland Publishing Inc.

Before being known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award®-winning screenwriter, William Inge had various other occupations in his life such as crew member of the Kansas State Highway Department, actor, high school teacher, radio announcer, and newspaper critic for the St. Louis Star-Times.

Inge found substantial success in the 1950s on Broadway with the four plays Come Back, Little Sheba (1950); Picnic (1953); Bus Stop (1955); and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). All four plays also went on to become successful Hollywood films. Although director Josh Logan made him rewrite the ending to Picnic, it did win the Pulitzer Prize. Inge, however, was insecure and depressed about his work and how it was received. His inexpressible homosexuality contributed to insufferable alienation in a 1950s America. He then saw himself as going through “strains of triumph”—unable to be genuinely happy because he was never able to be his true self. Inge battled with addiction and frequently underwent psychoanalysis to cope with his massive depression, and he was buoyed only briefly by the Academy Award® he received for writing the screenplay of Splendor in the Grass (1960). His anxiety and depression was compounded by his popularity diminishing significantly during the 1960s. Inge moved from New York to California where kept writing while teaching university classes. His later plays debuted disastrously and his two published novels did not sell well. In 1973, William Inge took his own life. He was buried in his hometown of Independence, Kansas. After his name and dates, his tombstone simply reads “Playwright.”

Inge’s plays are revived frequently because they explore the everyday in extraordinary ways. His very American treatments of themes involving the fragility of families, the tenuousness of friendship, the fear of falling in love, and the anxiety of acceptance will continue to attract audiences to the stories of William Inge.

“The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet…”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
Epigraph for Picnic

								William Inge: A Bibliography; Garland Publishing Inc.
American Theatre in the 1950s
1950		- South Pacific wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama - Bell, Book & Candle by John Van Druten premieres - Come Back, Little Sheba by William Inge premieres
1951		- The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams premieres
1953		- Arthur Miller’s The Crucible premieres - William Inge’s Picnic wins the Pulitzer Prize
1954		- N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker premieres
1955		- The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett premieres - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize - Bus Stop by William Inge premieres
1956		- Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is produced on Broadway,    three years after his death - Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot brings Absurdism to the American theatre
1957		- West Side Story opens on Broadway - The alternative liberal arts school, Black Mountain, near Asheville, NC closes after    fostering Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Amiri Baraka and the Happenings movement - Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings premieres - The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by William Inge premieres
1959		- Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun becomes the first play written by a black    woman to be produced on Broadway
		Years in Comparison on Broadway 1952-1953 Original Plays – 44 Original Musicals – 9 2008-2009 Original Plays – 8 Original Musicals – 10

 

KANSAS IN INGE and INGE IN KANSAS

Bust to Boom, Documentary Photographs of Kansas, 1936 - 1949; University Press of Kansas

“That he was a Midwesterner, a Kansan, gives his best-known work a certain character, a fidelity of detail, that contributes to but does not wholly constitute its significance.”
— Ralph Voss, A Life of William Inge

“A person lives in this mid-country with an inherent consciousness of the sky…And human life on the prairie is more dependent and influenced by the sky and its constant maneuverings than in other regions…Life and prosperity depend upon that sky, which can destroy a season’s crops in a few hours, by hail or blizzards or tornadoes or a relentlessly burning sun that can desiccate the land like an Old Testament curse.”
— William Inge, The Plains States

“Even an isolated prairie village can produce a killer or an artist, a thief or a saint, a dreamer or a builder: whatever possibilities human beings have anywhere else, they have also in the Midwestern village. That such an environment is uniformly wholesome and unerringly beneficent was a myth that had been well exposed by such Inge predecessors as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters, who was also a native of Kansas. William Inge, however, was the first American writer to expose that myth in the dramatic genre.”
— Ralph Voss, A Life of William Inge