Picnic: a summer romance in three acts

“Inge reveals the powerful mysteries in our lives.”—Tennessee Williams   Four plays by a quintessential twentieth-century playwright—Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs—with a foreword by the author. “This nice, well-bred next door neighbor, with the accent that belongs to no region except the region of good manners, has begun to uncover a world withing a world, and it is not the world that his welcome prepared you to meet, it's a secret world that exists behind the screen of neighborly decorum. And that's when and where you meet the talent of William Inge.”—Tennessee Williams “Inge has presented with astounding veracity the oppressive banality of the lives of his characters: the events of their lives have the nerve-tightening regularity of a dripping faucet. His female characters especially are engulfed by the bathos of their lives, and Inge capitalizes on this fact in order to heighten dramatically the moment of personal crisis which comes to each of them. In his four major successes—Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs—the play carries the audience through the moment of crisis; and the final curtain falls upon a note of hope and fulfillment.”—R. Baird Shuman