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Sebastian Stan in Picnic
Credit: Joan Marcus |
Two of the hottest playwrights of the 1950s are represented on Broadway right now with recently-opened revivals of Pulitzer Prize-winning works. Both William Inge's Picnic (1953) and Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are by gay authors, feature hunky heroes in states of undress, and deal with the adverse effects of repressed sexuality.Both new productions which opened in the same week are surprisingly tepid. When they first opened, the plays addressed the rampant puritanism of America which included ignoring homosexuality altogether. Today, open sexuality of all persuasions is everywhere and the directors of these productions seem to have forgotten these topics were once so shocking.
In Picnic, the forces of repressions work to stifle the happiness of all the characters. The "old-maid" schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (played by Elizabeth Marvel here, Eileen Heckart in the original Broadway production and Rosalind Russell in the movie) derisively comments on the bare torso of Hal Carter, the macho drifter who sets off sexual fireworks in a small Kansas town.It's later revealed Rosemary led a committee to have a naked male statue "castrated" by a janitor with a chisel. She represents the hypocrisy of sexual repression.
