Theater: American Airlines / 227 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Sensual, passionate and delightfully funny, PICNIC is a timeless American classic about the line between restraint and desire. It's a balmy Labor Day in the American Heartland, and a group of women are preparing for a picnic... but they'll have to lay a lot on the line before they can lay out the checkered cloths. When a handsome young drifter named Hal (Sebastian Stan) arrives, his combination of uncouth manners and titillating charm sends the women reeling, especially the beautiful Madge (Maggie Grace). When Hal is forced out of town, Madge must decide whether their fleeting encounter is worth changing the course of her life.
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January 13, 2013: The Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of William Inge’s “Picnic” opened on Sunday night, starring an exceptionally well-developed torso. Of course the torso belongs to a person, the actor Sebastian Stan. But it has been given the kind of lavish individual attention that would seem to warrant above-the-title billing.
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January 13, 2013: When hoping for a dramatic change in your life, be careful what you wish for.
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January 13, 2013: With their mid-century mores and soft-edged melodrama woven out of lives colored by despondency, emptiness and sexual repression, William Inge’s plays remain very much rooted in their period. Yet there’s something undeniably pleasurable about sinking into the vivid evocation of small-town Middle America in his 1953 Pulitzer winner, Picnic. While the heat between the central couple in director Sam Gold’s Broadway revival could have been turned up a notch, the veil of melancholy hanging over the play’s characters generates a quiet poignancy.
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January 13, 2013: It's been 60 years since "Picnic" premiered on Broadway. But as Roundabout Theatre's anniversary revival proves, art, like life, isn't fair. Some of us age better than others.
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January 13, 2013: William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize–winning “Picnic” is indisputably an American classic, but that doesn’t mean the play is foolproof. An ensemble piece, its mercurial moods and shifting subtext require careful orchestration. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it’s not getting from director Sam Gold at Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre. Coarse, excessively anxious for laughs, and deficient in the repression rampant in 1950s small-town Kansas, the production strands its 12 actors in several very different plays.
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