If you haven't ever seen it, I think you'll really enjoy Picnic by William Inge. This particular production, from Showtime in 1986, might not be THE definitive production, but it's quite good. This version merits inclusion, I think, b/c it was filmed as if it were a stage production, with only one set, the shared side yard between two modest houses.
William Inge, Kansas-born, who died almost forty years ago, was always on my list of must-read Americans, because of his landscape: he wrote from a place where square dancing was being supplanted by rock and roll, and the rustle of the grain silo was drowned out by the rumble of two-seater planes fuelled by new money. Between 1950 and 1957, when his four best-known scripts were produced on Broadway, Inge was heralded as the voice of Middle America.
snip
It’s Labor Day, the early nineteen-fifties. A picnic is planned, everyone in town will be there, but first Mrs. Potts has to attend to a few things at home. She cooks a substantial breakfast for a young drifter named Hal Carter (Sebastian Stan), in exchange for some work he’s going to do around the house. But Hal does more than lend the sweet Mrs. Potts a hand: he reminds her what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s presence. Shirtless and dark, Hal is an ex-football star whose soul is a chamber of need; one way to satisfy that need is to let women have at him, if only with their eyes. You get the feeling that someone, early on, was changed by Hal’s beauty, and that change changed him. His melancholy takes the form of expectation: will anyone ever truly see him again?
snip
The parents in Inge’s plays don’t know how their children feel, because they’re eaten up by the effort of maintaining appearances. But Hal doesn’t look like anyone else in “Picnic.” With his Elvis hair, his bluejeans, and his boots, he’s boundaryless but bound, not only to his past—he’s the product of a vindictive mother and a drunken father who died in jail—but to his developing feelings for Madge, which is to say his longing for a home. Despite Inge’s fabled sensitivity to his female characters, the more interesting among them are often driven by good old-fashioned—and always dramatic—misogyny. Many of them live in a kind of no man’s land, waiting for the highest bidder. But Hal’s no taker; he’s used to being taken.
http://www.newyorker.com/...
Picnic is a 1953 play by William Inge. The play was premiered at the Music Box Theatre, Broadway, on 19 February 1953 in a Theatre Guild production, directed by Joshua Logan, which ran for 477 performances.
The original cast featured Ralph Meeker, Eileen Heckart, Arthur O'Connell, Janice Rule, Reta Shaw, Kim Stanley and Paul Newman. Inge won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work, and Logan received a Tony Award for Best Director. The play also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play of the season.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The whole thing is embedded below the fleur-de-kos.
From the YT page,
The play Picnic filmed for cable, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gregory Harrison, Rue McClanahan, Conchata Ferrell, and Dick Van Patten in the cast.
but I also recognized Michael Learned as a supporting actor. (Please note: when I first watched this at YT, it got hung up and I had to forward through the opening credits. Watching it again here, I had no such problem.)
It's a very powerful play, I think. And must have seemed even more so when it first reached Broadway in 1953.