Menander’s comedy The Bad-Tempered Man [aka Dyskolos] was lost for centuries until discovered in the 1950s. A pivotal episode is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Pan at Phyle on a hillside in what is now Athens, where a sacrificial meal will cooked to appease the...
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the...
Before the picnic breaks up and all the guests are drowned in the Bay of Naples, peacock and eels are served. Baring’s sense of humor is satirical and macabre. Here is one of his jokes in Caligula’s Picnic, a one-act closet drama: Proteus: I once knew a...
There is no picnic scene in Ah, Wilderness! There is a Sachem Men’s Club picnic on Strawberry Island, but audiences never get to see it. All we know is that Uncle Sid Davis returns home tired and drunk. Featured Image: Eugene O’Neill with his wife and...
Riggs’s campfire picnic is atop Claremore Mound, a barren hill, 785 high that juts up from the flat landscape that was the scene of a battle between the Cherokees and the Osages. “At the right and forward, a fire burns. Three couples–boys and...
The box social auction, aka picnic basket auction, is Rodgers and Hammerstein II’s original to their production of Oklahoma! It’s a substitute for lovers’ combat. Instead of knights in armor, the good-hearted cowboy Curley and black-hearted farmhand...
When Hal Carter tells Madge Owens, “We’re not goin’ on no goddamn picnic,” he means they are “goin'” to make love instead. Madge is willing. They are so passionate, their lust so potent, audiences never notice that when the curtain...
Beckett’s setting for Waiting for Godot (En antendant Godot) is an empty stage and a tree without leaves. It’s an unlikely place for an unhappy picnic. The picnic begins when Pozzo and Lucky arrive. Pozzo brandishes a whip and holds Lucky at the end of a...
Bowles’s In the Summer House is an absurd play, and she admirably proves the rule that some people do silly things at picnics. The action begins with a lawn picnic at which characters with tenuous relationships incessantly bicker. When Mr. Solares enters,...
Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield is a metaphor for the stupidity of war. He undermines picnic expectations as the obtuse (but well-meaning) Tépans march onto the battlefield to entertain their son Zapo. When the action begins, Zapo is surprised to see...
