Summer Brave is a play by William Inge, a revision of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1953 play Picnic. Set in a small town in Kansas in the early 1950s, it focuses on Hal Carter, an attractive young stranger who drifts into town just before the annual Labor Day celebration and sets off a chain of events that prompts various residents to reflect on the present and contemplate an unpromising future.
Of it, Inge said, "A couple of years after Picnic had closed on Broadway, after the film version had made its success, I got the early version out of my files and began to rework it, just for my own satisfaction. Summer Brave is the result. I admit that I prefer it to the version of the play that was produced, but I don't necessarily expect others to agree . . . I feel that it is more humorously true than Picnic, and it does fulfill my original intentions."
The Broadway production was staged two years after Inge's death. Produced by Fritz Holt and directed by Michael Montel, it was not a success. After three previews, it opened on October 26, 1975 at the ANTA Playhouse and closed after 18 performances. Ernest Thompson, who later won fame as the writer of On Golden Pond, starred as Hal Carter. The supporting cast included Nan Martin, Alexis Smith, Jill Eikenberry, Miles Chapin, and Peter Weller.
Famous quotes containing the words summer and/or brave:
“And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere ...
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)