'Picnic' drifter lacks danger

Kyle Lawson

The Arizona Republic

Nov. 13, 2005 12:00 AM

There's a deep divide between sex and love. Some lower a plank across it and get on with things. Others never make it from one side to the other.

William Inge's Picnic , now onstage at Phoenix Theatre, is full of characters who want to be loved but haven't figured out how to span the gulf. Most have resigned themselves to a generic equivalent, feeling only remotely like the genuine article but better than nothing.

Enter a drifter, young, not too bright but bursting his jeans with raw sexuality. In short order, everyone is back at the brink, contemplating the distance across.

If Inge has any poetry in him, it's the voice of the unrequited and those who make the most of second best. No one walks away unscathed in his plays, and certainly not in Picnic . Sex may serve the characters as a tool and an escape but its potential as a bridge builder is flimsy at best.

For this small-town soap opera to work, it needs a drifter who's as charismatic as he is rough about the edges, as sensual as he is muscle-bound, as dangerous as he is irresistible. Unfortunately, Donal Thoms-Capello doesn't measure up.

He's a beauty, no doubt of that. Not a bad actor, either. But his drifter is a big, overgrown boy, romping among the play's womenfolk like a puppy wanting to be liked, not the elemental force of nature that will send their lives careening on a new course.

Happily, the rest of the cast is up to Inge's requirements, particularly Katie Olsen as a young woman torn between the man everyone believes is right for her and the one she wants for herself. Erin Singleton and Robert Holt give good accounts of themselves as a girl on the verge of womanhood and a spinster schoolteacher's reluctant beau. Robyn Allen and Maria Amorocho deliver their usual finely turned performances as a single mother doing her best and the schoolmarm.

Director Karla Koskinen paces the play's three acts quickly but never loses her grip on the story. Scenic and lighting designer Jim Hunter captures the Midwestern setting perfectly, and Gail Wolfenden-Steib's '50s clothing proves she is the Valley's costume designer without peer.