Everybody shines in KCAT’s Picnic

Some live for theater and some for the theater experience, the kind that stays with you long after the curtain call. The Kansas City Actors Theatre has opened its “A Classic American Summer” series with a Picnic for both segments of theater lovers. It’s an immediate satisfaction that lingers in its pleasures and its pull.

William Inge’s 1953 play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and it remains a masterwork. Inge doesn’t litter — every line of dialogue, each pause and allusion, are relevant to his storytelling — and 60 years later, Picnic‘s themes still resonate. Yet, as director Mark Robbins writes in his program notes, Inge was asked to change the original, “much bleaker” ending for Picnic‘s Broadway debut. For this production, Robbins has dug into the original text and its variations to create what he calls “an amalgam of sorts.”

To perform this Inge fusion, he has melded a talented cast. Under Robbins’ intelligent and sharp direction, each actor connects — physically, emotionally, nonverbally — and gives a spot-on performance.

Pieces of Inge’s past pulse through the powerful but often humorous Picnic. It takes place in a small town on Labor Day in the early 1950s, a setting emblematic of the playwright’s native Independence, Kansas, the kind of community that constrains its residents into conformity. But even here, parents can’t always hold down their kids.

Madge Owens (Emily Peterson) is the town beauty — an 18-year-old admired by both men and women. Her mother, Flo (Melinda McCrary), hopes to cement the girl’s path into a promising future with the well-to-do college student Alan Seymour (the adept Chris Roady). Peterson and McCrary bring perfect sensitivity to a mother-daughter relationship in which the elder’s past and the ingénue’s present meet head-on. Madge’s looks are her entrée and her end-all, and Flo knows that choices reverberate.

Men lust after Madge. “I can’t send you flowers,” the paperboy (J.T. Nagle) says, “but I can send you.” Even her beau, Alan, calls her “Delilah,” after the Book of Judges’ famous temptress. When teased for looking at herself so often in the mirror, Madge says it’s the only way she can prove that she’s “real.” Through Peterson’s subtle, remarkable portrayal, we get her kind of loneliness and we sense her longing for something more.

Others aren’t without jealousy, particularly Madge’s younger sister, Millie (a very good Alisa Lynn). A tomboy without Madge’s genetic gifts, she’s the intellectual child who reads and hangs Picassos in her room. “Pictures don’t have to be pretty,” she says. An Inge stand-in, she hopes one day to board that train that whistles by, head to New York and write books. (Madge listens longingly as well to the passing railcars.)

And Rosemary Sydney (Jen Mays), a schoolteacher who boards with the Owenses, is getting past her prime. She dates the businessman Howard Bevans (the consummate David Fritts) but calls him “a friend-boy, not a boy-friend.” At day’s end, as she admires “the most flaming sunset I ever did see,” a light she sees as fighting hard against impending darkness, we know she speaks about herself and, perhaps, all of us. Mays is outstanding as a still young woman, negotiating conflicting emotions in her mundane and restricted existence. (Mackenzie Goodwin and Kathleen Kane deserve notice as Rosemary’s friends, a pair of fellow teachers.)

No one stirs things up more than the handsome Hal (the electric Phillip Shinn), who puts the womenfolk in a flutter. The former high school football star is down on his luck and performing odd jobs for the Owenses’ more free-spirited neighbor, Helen Potts (Kathleen Warfel, excellent), who would “welcome a good cyclone, even if it blew everything away.”

People should take more care with their wishes. A self-centered talker, Hal is the true center of the storm. A dreamer who sweats charisma, he’s driven by maleness over mind, ready to repent and then sin again. He meets Madge at a crucial moment, and Shinn shows us more than Hal’s bravado.

The simple but interesting set (designed by Jim Misenheimer) effectively creates a sense of place without overshadowing the play’s action. The lighting (by Shane Rowse) beautifully depicts times of day. And period costumes (by Tyler Wilson) remind us that we’re in the ’50s.

But it’s not Picnic‘s era that stays in mind as you leave Union Station. Rather, it’s the depth of feeling these characters, these actors, emanate. This Picnic makes you look around afterward to see if there’s an Amtrak in the railyard, readying to depart.