N.L. goes to a Picnic - By N.L. Belardes

Picnic is currently playing at Bakersfield Community Theatre.
Go to theatreaddict.com. Check for showtimes and links to other Bakersfield theatres.

Jack Kerouac was gay. Any way you dice it up he was giving head to Jazz greats and writing great American novels back in the 1950s when mainstream literature was not at all into gay themes. So he hid his lifestyle publicly and in literature.

Kerouac was the epitome of the tough guy jock. He left high school on a football scholarship for Columbia University where he excelled, got injured, then changed his life. He became a sports reporter, then left America for a stint with the merchant marines. Then, he got out and began writing novels. He wrote The Town and the City, On the Road… and eventually, Maggie Cassidy, a novel about leaving small town life and a small town girl who wouldn’t have talk of the Big City life. He drifted from her for a new life of…



I went to see Picnic the other day at the Bakersfield Community Theatre; it’s a play based on a 1953 script. Seeing the play by itself, without understanding the historical context is terrible. It’s white WASPish America. It’s cookie cutout performances. It’s a steamy romance told in non-steamy dialogue. There is a wailing showstopper from Julie Jordan Scott. She portrays a middle-aged woman on the brink of becoming a martyr for all that is holy in the realm of American dysfunctionalism. Can that even be an ism?

The performances are purposely canned into a 1950s realm of: you talk, then I talk, you get dramatic, then I will get dramatic. That’s mixed with a dysfunctional family told through 1950s traits, and is a story about a woman finding a man and about ma giving up altogether to raise daughters who are following in her footsteps… go fuck a boy and be his manservant until you grow old and he moves on sorta mentality. Sure, there’s a subplot: more women wanting men and the one man they want is a rebel with a Fifties doowop cut. He’s on the lamb and his college buddy get chicks just because it’s what happens to geeks with college cash. It’s a lot like Kerouac and his buddy Cassady, not Cassidy, but that’s where the real plot is: a possible too-close friendship gone sour over a goil, not girl.

Wah.

Yet, put the show in context and you can learn from it. The characters and acting are locked into a 1950s sphere. By today’s standards that’s really bad. But by my standards it was a living history revealed amid loud floor fans in a quaint theatre. I had just stepped into the dysfunctional Ozzie and Harriet world, where Ozzie was just a shadow, a bad father who ran off to the circus. We’re left with Harriet and two shitty kids who are far stiffer than the Bradys, but too hip to be related to the Beaver. They’re the dark shadowy cutouts of literature and pop culture imitating past rebels; the beats, the generation that took drug culture and gave it a name. Only in this story the only rebel Americana is in a girl who puts on lipstick in a window and a character the director wanted to be some kind of walking Kerouac with a past love affair with his dweebie buddy who has an education. Yes, there’s a hint… makes you wonder why the director couldn’t just make an openly gay-oriented play. Oh I forgot, in Bakersfield, many people hide their orientation.







Was the playwright imitating Kerouac and a rebellious sense of youth in post World War Two America? Likely. Maybe the father of the story was a victim of the World War, or better yet, Korea, as the original play hit the stages just as the Korean conflict came to a close and left a bad taste in the mouth of America: a conflicted America in a stalemate—a cookie-cutout of war as it shouldn’t be, with neither America or Korea a victor to this day. America runs off with the West, leaves North Korea in the arms of the North… the train is leaving—and a foreshadowing of Vietnam, where America once again runs into the arms of its Western lover: Europe.

There aren’t any ecstasy moments in Picnic. No rock and roll, no screamo, emo, rural rock punk. There’s no hip-hop and no angry young kids influenced by post-terrorized America, and pissed off because MTV isn’t on-the-edge rebellious anymore, but rather a plastic remnant of its former self. Picnic is just a big dysfunctional cookie cutout from 1950s Americana as life really didn’t happen, but as pop culture America might have perceived a dysfunctional family, if TV would have been allowed to explore such back when Lucy was trying to hump Desi from an entire bed away…

(Read Matildakay's take on Picnic)

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This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Tuesday, September 12, 2006. You can leave your response.