It doesn't help that some of Inge's slang has dated badly. What young actor today could talk about "dames" or call another kid a "goon" with a straight face? As the current production of "Picnic" at the Stoneham Theatre makes (sometimes painfully) clear, it's almost impossible to pull off.
There are some subtle pleasures in this staging of Inge's sad, comic, brusquely sentimental tale of a former college football star turned drifter and the small-town women he discombobulates one Labor Day weekend. Most of those pleasures come from the skilled actresses playing the grown-up women.
There's Sarah Newhouse, spiky and wryly funny as the schoolteacher who's trying to get her longtime beau to pony up a ring; Leigh Barrett, brave but faintly desperate as the teacher's wistful spinster pal; and Lisa Foley, tough and warm as an older neighbor harassed by her meanly aging mother. And, especially, there's Dee Nelson, who's at once tense and luminous as the mother struggling to protect her two growing girls, the prom-queen-pretty Madge and her bookish tomboy kid sister, Millie.
Oh, but see? "Bookish tomboy"? That's not an accepted mid-century cliche. And yet that's Millie: one second reading Carson McCullers, the next chasing barefoot after a taunting paperboy. Lively, curious, just starting to see how trapped she is in the life she's landed in, she may be the most interesting character in the play.
At first that's hard to see at Stoneham, however, because Emily Graham-Handley sounds more like a 21st-century smart-aleck, raised on Facebook and "Gossip Girl," than like a kid who's too smart for her own good in 1950s Kansas. Graham-Handley does relax into the role, and she's got enough presence and chops to make us enjoy watching her do it, but director Caitlin Lowans should have helped her find a more authentic emotional tone and physical style for the period.
Such problems are even graver for Aidan Kane, a slender, sloe-eyed, miscast actor whose Hal Carter doesn't look as if he ever played touch football, much less college ball. He seems a sweet enough kid, but without a simmering physical presence in this part, "Picnic" loses its center.
