"Having one good play to his credit, William Inge now has another play, Picnic...and memorable though Come Back Little Sheba was three seasons ago, Picnic is a notable improvement." - The New York Times
"William Inge, the grain belt Tennessee Williams, was one of the three most important playwrights in the American theater of the ’50s, along with Williams and Arthur Miller...Nobody wrote more profoundly about the frustrations and longings of small-town Midwesterners—and Picnic is generally considered Inge’s masterpiece...Presenting all men and women as uniformly flawed and in need of psychological diagnosis and treatment, the Kansas-born writer divided critics and audiences from the start, but Picnic is his least shocking play, and his most accessible...Picnic is really a play about how you always want what you cannot have. Every character in it longs for something that is just beyond reach—beauty, marriage, respectability, economic security, true love, emotional peace. Inge writes warmly, with such sensitive, understated compassion about little people desperate for a place in a bigger world that his work is timeless" - New York Observer