Picnic
“What good is being pretty?” Madge wonders out loud in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic . In Roundabout’s Sam Gold-directed revival, it seems that being pretty isn’t worth much. Written in 1953, Picnic is set in the backyard shared by Mrs. Helen Potts (Ellen Burstyn), a lonely woman who is left to take care of her mother (whom we hear but never see) and Flo Owens (Mare Winningham), mother to the pretty Madge (Maggie Grace) and the smart (read: not nearly as beautiful as Madge) Millie (Madeleine Martin). Though 18-year-old Madge has been seeing the well-to-do Alan (Ben Rappaport) all summer, it’s Labor Day and when she sees the hunky Hal (Sebastian Stan) laboring in the yard, she questions her choices. Offering a foil is the Owens’s boarder, schoolteacher Rosemary (Elizabeth Marvel) and her beau, Howard (Reed Birney). Essentially, Picnic is about lost souls trying to find their place in the world. In the younger generation, we see the possibilities of what co...