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January 13, 2013

The Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of William Inge’s “Picnic” opened on Sunday night, starring an exceptionally well-developed torso. Of course the torso belongs to a person, the actor Sebastian Stan. But it has been given the kind of lavish individual attention that would seem to warrant above-the-title billing.

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Associated Press
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Jennifer
Farrar

January 13, 2013

When hoping for a dramatic change in your life, be careful what you wish for.

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January 13, 2013

With their mid-century mores and soft-edged melodrama woven out of lives colored by despondency, emptiness and sexual repression, William Inge’s plays remain very much rooted in their period. Yet there’s something undeniably pleasurable about sinking into the vivid evocation of small-town Middle America in his 1953 Pulitzer winner, Picnic. While the heat between the central couple in director Sam Gold’s Broadway revival could have been turned up a notch, the veil of melancholy hanging over the play’s characters generates a quiet poignancy.

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Newsday
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STEVE
PARKS

January 13, 2013

It’s been 60 years since "Picnic" premiered on Broadway. But as Roundabout Theatre’s anniversary revival proves, art, like life, isn’t fair. Some of us age better than others.

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Backstage
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Erik
Haagensen

January 13, 2013

William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize–winning “Picnic” is indisputably an American classic, but that doesn’t mean the play is foolproof. An ensemble piece, its mercurial moods and shifting subtext require careful orchestration. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it’s not getting from director Sam Gold at Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre. Coarse, excessively anxious for laughs, and deficient in the repression rampant in 1950s small-town Kansas, the production strands its 12 actors in several very different plays.

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