Picnic & Our Town

Writers’ Theatre. By William Inge. Dir. David Cromer. With ensemble cast.

The Hypocrites at Chopin Theatre. By Thornton Wilder. Dir. Cromer. With ensemble cast.

“Small-town values” have played a starring role on the campaign trail this year. Barack Obama’s comment about “bitter” rural residents clinging to guns, religion and xenophobia was spun as an elitist insult to hardworking Americans. Speakers at the Republican National Convention, from Fred Thompson to Sarah Palin, praised small towns and small-town values (this season’s version, it would seem, of “family values”).

So what are these small-town values, anyway? It looks as though Cromer might be a good guy to ask. He’s directed two major revivals, now running concurrently, that depict small-town life in seemingly divergent ways; what Cromer gets right is that both are true. His deeply sympathetic portrayals of small-town virtues and vices have plenty of lessons for us city folk.

His dynamic new fall offering is at Writers’ Theatre. Picnic, Inge’s 1953 melodrama, depicts small towns as they’re so often viewed by those who make it a point of pride to have escaped them: repressive, judgmental and brimming with unfulfilled longing. The arrival of an outsider strips away the tacit artifice of polite society with the threat of sex. Gorgeous drifter Hal Carter (played by Boyd Harris with perfect false swagger) shows up in town on the morning of the Labor Day picnic, catching the interest of “prettiest girl in town” Madge Owens and her bookish sister Millie, as well as the disapproving eye of their single mother.

Cromer and scenic designer Jack Magaw emphasize the physical and psychological claustrophobia of small-town life by staging the play in the round. When Flo Owens urges her weeping, lovelorn daughter to get up off the ground because the neighbors are watching from their porches, the two really are being watched from all sides. (Hanna Dworkin stands out as the busybody schoolmarm who masks her disappointment with judgment of others.)

The small-town value Inge disdains, as Cromer and his expert cast demonstrate, is conformity. If you don’t come from a good family, if you’re not married by 21, if you don’t go to the right church or don’t subscribe to a moral code that keeps you as unhappy as everyone else, you’re not welcome here. “Why can’t things be simple?” asks Flo, exasperated by the unwelcome presence of an unknown quantity. Even in the 1950s, this production seems to say, Americans were yearning for an idealized 1950s America that never existed.

Contrast that with Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 portrait of a dozen years in the life of a small New Hampshire burg. As Cromer’s stellar production for the Hypocrites (first seen in April and now remounted at the Chopin) emphasizes, Wilder’s concerned with the better angels of small-town nature: the sense of community; looking out for the welfare of others as well as our own; appreciation of life’s every, every minute.

On second viewing, it’s hard not to think of this devastating Our Town as the flip side of the Picnic coin. The “simplicity” that Picnic’s Flo wishes for is a freedom from making choices. Our Town, on the other hand, is an exhortation to relish the choices we make.