'Picnic' launches 25th anniversary season for Hampton Theatre Company

When the group now known as the Hampton Theatre Company chose its first play for production in 1984, founders Jimmy Ewing, his mother, June Ewing, and Jim Irving decided to go with a classic: “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Adapted by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich from Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” the show had won the Tony Award for best play when it opened on Broadway in 1955, and earned its authors the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Now, 25 years later, the company has chosen another classic of roughly the same vintage to celebrate its silver anniversary season: William Inge’s “Picnic.”

This show also earned the playwright a Pulitzer Prize, along with a number of critics’ awards, when it opened on Broadway in 1953, and it was subsequently adapted for a 1955 film with the same director as the play, Joshua Logan.

The movie, starring William Holden and Kim Novak, won two Academy Awards and was nominated for four others, including best director and best picture.

And though the play is now more than 50 years old, George Loizides, the director of the HTC production opening this week in Quogue, says the characters, themes and issues the playwright addresses in “Picnic” are just as compelling and relevant today as they were when the play, and then the movie, wowed audiences and critics back in the 1950s.

One of the ideas that the playwright explored in “Picnic” and his other plays was the difference between appearances and reality: the ways in which what’s on the surface can mask darker forces in play.

“If you look at the set, it’s sort of ‘American Dream’-ish,” Mr. Loizides said in an interview this week at the theater, pointing to the picket fences surrounding perfect houses on the stage, suggesting what he called the “1950s post-war calmness on the surface.”

“But under the surface there was more unrest,” the director said. “The 1950s still had Jim Crow laws for segregation. Abortions were still illegal. Sex out of marriage was illegal in many states.

“The social and moral unrest of the times mirrors the unrest in the lives of the women in this play: lonely lives of desperation.”

As the play opens, the arrival in town of a rugged and handsome drifter, Hal, played in Quogue by Justin Sease, sets all the women in motion, sparking reactions ranging from passion to fear, and serving as a different kind of catalyst for each of them.

The 18-year-old Madge (Rachael McOwen) is the most beautiful girl in town, going steady with the richest boy in town, Allen (Nicholas Yenson), but he doesn’t arouse real passion in her. “When she meets Hal,” Mr. Loizides said, “the fire is lit.”

Madge worries that she is limited to one dimension by everyone’s focus on her beauty, and she sees in Hal, in addition to a chance for real passion, a ticket out of her straitjacketed life stranded in Kansas.

Meanwhile, her mother, Flo (Pam Kern), is fearful that Madge’s attraction to Hal will wreck her chances to marry Allen. She also fears that her younger daughter, Millie (Catherine Cusick), a tomboy who has already won a scholarship to go away to college when she finishes high school, will be distracted by the handsome stranger.

Rosemary (Frances Sherman), a schoolteacher who is boarding in Flo’s house, has an ongoing but not very committed relationship with Howard (Paul Bolger). Seeing Hal’s independence makes her realize that she needs to get Howard to commit or she will be spending the rest of her life alone.

Mrs. Potts (Diana Marbury) is the first one to encounter Hal, and it is she who suggests that Hal take Millie to the picnic, which in turn makes Flo fearful for her younger daughter.

In addition, Mrs. Potts, who had been married for one day before her mother chased her down and had the wedding aned many years in the past, now must care for invalid mother. Whether because he represents the son she never had, or only serves as a reminder that she once had a man, and love, in her life, Hal is welcomed into Mrs. Potts’s home.

The big themes of the play, the director said, deal with loneliness, a sense of being stranded, and love and how it changes things, for better or worse.

“A lot of this could relate to Inge’s own history,” Mr. Loizides said, noting that the playwright’s mother ran a boarding house with three schoolteachers living in it. Another autobiographical footnote is tied to the role of alcohol in the play, and in the stories about Madge’s now-absent father, who had a reputation for drinking and fooling around, much like the playwright’s father.

Mr. Loizides directed a production of “Summer Brave” in the late 1980s when he was teaching at Ward Melville High School, principally because it has more characters and so is better suited for a high school cast. He also directed Inge’s “Bus Stop” for the Hampton Theatre Company last year.

“It helps to do multiple plays by a playwright, as a director,” Mr. Loizides said. One reason, he said, is that “most playwrights deal with particular themes. This is true of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller,” playwrights of the period who are often compared with Inge, “as well as of Inge himself.”

Beyond the fact that the playwright is dealing with universal themes of loneliness, love and desire that transcend time, the director said he is drawn to Inge “because I like his style. I find the language to be natural: common and simplistic on the surface, but saying a lot more—it has a lot of depth.

“It’s like the ’50s: simplistic on the surface, but filled with a lot of social and moral unrest. And I like the way he portrays his characters: he lays bare their weaknesses, but still makes them sympathetic.”

Diana Marbury, who plays Mrs. Potts, is the artistic director and one of the original members of the Hampton Theatre Company, having played a role in the third show the HTC produced, “Hot L Baltimore.” Reflecting this week on the company’s 25th anniversary, she said, “I look at the amount of work that’s been done over the past 25 years, and it’s wonderful to see how the company has grown.” The late June Ewing, one of the original founders, “would be proud to see what it’s become, and the differences between then and now,” she said.

As for the choice of “Picnic” to kick off the silver anniversary season, “that has always been one of the great assets of the company,” she said, “choosing so many wonderful plays” that are rewarding for actors and audiences alike.

Sarah Hunnewell, the executive director of the HTC, said this week, “as, sadly, local theater companies struggle to survive, and some of our prominent local venues no longer produce plays at all, the Hampton Theatre Company is proud to be still going strong after 25 years, bringing the East End four to five important plays each season.

“The company has always operated frugally, and often on a proverbial shoestring, but has strived foremost to keep its standards high and prove that great theater can be affordable.”

Company co-founder Jimmy Ewing has been acting, directing and designing and building sets for the HTC since the very beginning, in 1984. “I think this opening show, along with the rest of this year’s 25th anniversary season, reflects what has been HTC’s approach to choosing theater pieces,” Mr. Ewing said.

“We want to present the best of the classics, a range of relevant contemporary plays and a generous shot of good simple fun,” he continued. “‘Picnic’ is one of the great classic pieces still significant today as we continually stumble along searching for meaning in a world of private, individual lives so often seemingly uneventful and mundane.

“And then,” he said, trailing off in wonder, “we are suddenly shocked and surprised ...”

“Picnic” by William Inge will be presented by the Hampton Theatre Company at the Quogue Community Hall on Jessup Avenue from Thursday, October 22, through Sunday, November 8, with shows at 8 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. on Sundays. For ticket information, call OvationTix at 1-866-811-4111, or visit www.hamptontheatre.org.