One is a rooming-house run by Flo Owens, a fortyish widow with two teenage daughters. In the other lives a slightly older widow, Mrs Potts, and her bedridden mother. It is a beautiful Labour Day morning. Last night Mrs Potts took in a handsome young drifter named Hal, and this morning he is doing some chores in exchange for a hearty breakfast and some pocket money. It reached New York at an unusual time in Broadway history, when audiences had been flocking to serious plays by such writers as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, plays that delved into family relationships that had formed the present-day America and its values.
Picnic is about small-town life, and the dreams and fears of the people who live there.
Periodically a train passes, its whistle a symbol of both the pull of far-off places and the comfort of the familiar. Following its Broadway premiere in February 1953, Picnic won several major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The play ran for 477 performances, and critics praised Inge for its humour and sensitivity. For a while he worked as a radio announcer, amateur actor, and high-school English teacher. He then taught at a women's college in Missouri - ironically, one of his teaching colleagues there was Maude Adams, who a generation earlier had become famous as America's first Peter Pan.