Research Paper on:
Picnic Play by William Inge

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
of an otherwise laid back existence, there is, however, another side of this story: dealing with conflict between human beings. The exact manner in which Inge reveals this conflict  is an integral component to the playwrights overall mystique, utilizing what only looks like a simple, unaffected community and turn it into something just as cosmopolitan as New York City.  At first, one may not plainly recognize Inges deeper assertions beyond his telltale quiet and pastoral direction; however, there is no denying the fact that the undercurrent of human  conflict is more than apparent - and more times than not the characters are in conflict with themselves. "In Picnic as in all of his work, Inge reveals an  obsession with innocence lost. It is perhaps a reflection of a disenchantment with postwar society that urged people to marry young or die lonely. More likely, it is  a manifestation of Inges melancholy (he struggled with booze, self-pity, and waning talent for decades before taking his own life). As in every Inge play, time is the great  enemy of both youth and love" (Ritter PG). Hal, an out-of-towner who drops by to seek out an old friend, is a dreamer with no solid grounding on a  collision course with Madge, the town beauty whose own discontent with the way by which her life is advancing progressively becomes the focal point of the play. The superficiality  of what Madge has come to know as her life takes on a new meaning when she falls hard for Hal, a strapping young man with brawn but not much  brains, whose pie-in-the-sky attitude only serves to perpetuate the shallowness of his half-baked endeavors. "It is one of the troubling ironies in Inges tale of star-crossed love that while