In The Hands Of Will Davis Picnic Becomes A Fluid And Gender Fluid Ballet

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivete . . .                —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I tend to think of Picnic as the play we might’ve got had there been a sequel to Death of a Salesman centered on Willy Loman’s first-born son, Biff. Like Biff, Inge’s hero, Hal Carter, is a good-natured, troubled galoot: a football star at school who’s fallen to drifting over the years, partly due to oedipal trauma but also because the business world he’s expected to join—expects himself to join—is all wrong for him. Hal’s intelligence isn’t in his brains; it’s in his hands, legs, belly, and groin, in his thoughtless genius for lifting stuff and dancing.

Through 4/23: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM American Theater Company 1909 W. Byron 773-409-4125atcweb.org $38