Jane Lucas

For the cast and production staff of Stained Glass Playhouse‘s Picnic–meditations on William Inge’s play and the book that Millie reads:

William Inge’s choice to place The Ballad of the Sad Café in the hands of Picnic’s Millie Owens—along with his choosing to write, in the words of Alan Seymour, that it’s “on the reading list at college” (22)—denotes the popularity and stature that Carson McCullers’ novella achieved in a short time. Houghton Mifflin published The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951; Picnic debuted in 1953. But Inge’s inclusion of McCullers’ novella isn’t simply a nod to a then-recent work. For Inge, Ballad serves as a countermelody, at times complementing his own themes and at times appearing as a reflection of Picnic in a funhouse mirror.

At first glance, the stories seem disparate, just as at first glance Ballad’s Lymon Willis isn’t what he appears to be. When a townsperson spots him in the distance, he says, “‘A calf got loose’” (399). Moments later, someone else says, “‘No, it’s somebody’s young’un.’” But Lymon is neither. As he draws nearer, it becomes clear that he is “a hunchback . . . scarcely more than four feet tall” (399). Though physically, he couldn’t be further from Picnic’s “exceedingly handsome” Hal Carter (7), both Lymon and Hal are the archetypal stranger-come-to-town.

Welcoming the stranger, as Helen Potts does, comes as no surprise. As Flo Owens observes, Helen “takes in every Tom, Dick, and Harry” (11). Conversely, Amelia Evans, the usually stand-offish storekeeper, has never taken in anyone before Lymon shows up and claims her as kin. But the sociability of Lymon—Cousin Lymon as Miss Amelia comes to call him—leads her to transform her store into a nightly café that offers a gathering spot in the spirit of the back porches of Helen and Flo. Yet despite the popularity of Cousin Lymon and the café he inspires, some of the townspeople are scandalized when he takes up residence in Miss Amelia’s rooms above the café:

[A]ccording to Mrs. MacPhail, a warty-nosed old busybody who is continually moving her sticks of furniture from one room to another, according to her and to certain others, these two were living in sin. If they were related, they were only a cross between first and second cousins, and even that could in no way be proved. Now, of course Miss Amelia was a powerful blunderbuss of a person more than six feet tall—and Cousin Lymon was a weakly little hunchback reaching only to her waist. But so much the better for Mrs. Stumpy McPhail and her cronies, for they and their kind glory in conjunctions which are ill-matched and pitiful. (417)

The notions of Mrs. MacPhail and the other gossips in Ballad are the reasons that Picnic’s Rosemary Sydney labels the book “filthy” and says that “Everyone in it is some sort of degenerate” (22). Though the exact nature of Amelia and Lymon’s relationship is never clear, they are judged not only for their apparent transgressions but also for their unconventional appearances—a testament to the belief that good looks, themselves, are a virtue, a tenet that Picnic’s beauty, Madge Owens, calls into question when she asks, “What good is it to be pretty?” (16).

For all of Madge’s and Hal’s natural good looks, it’s clear that what we behold as beauty is also partly artifice. When Hal tells his friend Alan Seymour about his stint in Hollywood, he says, “[Y]ou gotta have a certain kind of teeth or they can’t use you . . . they’d have to pull all my teeth and give me new ones” (26). When Madge delays getting ready for the picnic, Alan prods her, saying, “Go on upstairs and get beautiful for us” (49). Still, unlike, the cross-eyed, six-foot Amelia and the hunchback Lymon, Madge, with or without powder and lipstick, finds the image in the mirror affirming. As she says to her mother, Flo, “It just seems that when I’m looking in the mirror that’s the only way that I can prove to myself that I’m alive” (42). Yet Madge is as much a misfit as McCullers’ oddballs, a truth signified in the image of her as Miss Neewollah published in The Kansas City Star’s Sunday magazine. Due to a printing error, her mouth appears in the middle of her forehead, rendering her grotesque.

That image of Madge with her mouth in the middle of her forehead is like the woman in the Picasso prints that hang over her sister Millie’s bed, a woman that Madge sums up sarcastically as one “with seven eyes. Very Pretty” (23). Millie knows that works of art “don’t have to be pretty” (23), that the woman with her seven eyes speaks a truth that photographic realism doesn’t. Similarly, The Kansas City Star’s unrealistic photograph doesn’t lie. Objectifying Madge distorts her.

Millie vows that after she graduates from college that she’s “going to New York, and . . . write novels that’ll shock people right out of their senses” (87). Some people, like Ballad’s Mrs. McPhail and Picnic’s Rosemary Sydney, may be shocked. Others, ones with Millie’s own sensibility, will read her books and feel the way Millie herself feels when she reads The Ballad of the Sad Café. When Hal asks her what it’s about, she says, “[I]t’s kind of hard to explain, it’s just the way you feel when you read it—kind of warm inside and sad and amused—all at the same time” (53). The same may be said of Picnic. Near the play’s end, before Hal jumps the train, he says to Madge, “I feel like a freak to say this, but—I love you” (85). We all feel like freaks, Hal. We all are freaks, for that matter; and we love, for better or worse—and all at the same time.

Works Cited

Inge, William. Picnic. 1953. Dramatists Play Service Inc., n.d.

McCullers, Carson. “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” 1951. Carson McCullers: The Complete Novels. The Library of America, 2001. pp. 395-458.