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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 annulled 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.
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