'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.