Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba: William Inge in Repertory

In Picnic, when a gorgeous drifter arrives in a small Kansas town, no one is prepared. He brings with him the possibilities and promises — some true, some false — of a life with real options. His instant and incendiary chemistry with a local 18-year-old unexpectedly destroys the illusions of comfort harbored by everyone in this heartland’s physically expansive and emotionally suffocating landscape. William Inge’s legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning play is over 60 years old, but the American questions of sex as currency, of class as possibility, and youth as opportunity are timeless.

In Come Back, Little Sheba, a middle-aged Midwestern couple lives from one day to the next — Lola, breathless with fear of silence and solitude, and Doc, a recovering alcoholic. Into their tired lives comes Marie, their boarder, so flush with the riches of her youth that they can no longer deny how they spent their own. Their fragile acceptance of their own stifling reality is suddenly and brutally tested as Inge mercilessly exposes the pain and regret of the past that can be unmasked by the mere presence of youth and possibility of the future. Come Back, Little Sheba explores the endless and inevitable disappointments of the ever-seductive American dream.