"...honest, genuine ... echoes of lonliness and vulnerability"

August 18, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

William Inge’s Bus Stop at the Williamstown Theatre Festival rounds off brilliantly a successful summer season in the new theatre. Under Will Frears’ sensitive, but never sentimental direction, and set with nostalgic detail by Takeshi Kata, the play evokes the American heartland at that brief moment when, with WWII finally behind, life seemed “normal” for ordinary people.

Shortly “red scares” and school children scrambling under desks at alerts would shatter the normal, but for a brief time there was still room for a terrible innocence in the hearts of the young. In Inge’s play, when a snowstorm strands a bus-driver and his four passengers for the night in Grace’s Diner, there could still be a brash cowboy, virgin at l9, and a young girl, sexually active since 14, who both still inhabit that innocence.

Although central to Inge’s plot, they do not dominate it. The cast consists of eight, the bus driver, his other passengers and the three “locals.” Grace, her teen-age waitress, and the local sheriff also have lives and concerns of their own. A great deal of the strength of the play lies in Inge’s almost Chekovian determination to bring us, if only briefly, into each character’s life, as well as that of the two young quarreling lovers.

All the actors are well-cast. Elizabeth Banks, as Cherie (saddled by the fact that the ghost of Marilyn Monroe hovers over the role) makes it her own in a sassy Ozark defiance and indignation and a pride in her own success as chanteuse, which she proudly displays atop a table during the long night’s “home entertainment”. Her moment of realizing what love, as opposed to sex, could be, is underplayed beautifully and touchingly.

Logan Marshall-Green as Bo Decker, cowboy who thinks he owns the world but gets pulled down a peg by the sheriff, blusters in like the storm but subsides to apology and acceptance of a world that just happens to include other people. By the end of the play we realize he is capable of actually being gentle to Cherie.

As Elma Duckworth, Laura Heisler gives us an appealing teen-age girl, her head full of poetry as she serves up the scrambled eggs and chats with the customers. She is naïf and easily taken in by the aging would-be seducer Dr. Gerald Lyman (Bill Camp) one of the most talkative characters in the play whose past includes, if we are to believe him, a great deal of higher education, but an inability to resist his preying on the young. He provides much of the humor in the play, as well as a dark side, but in the end, without sentimentality, protects his latest conquest by remounting the bus.

Grace, ( Elizabeth Marvel) is no-nonsense, capable, easy- going and efficient. She has run the diner for years and will continue to do so, seeing at the same time nothing evil in occasional trysts with the easy-going, affable bus driver (John Douglas Thompson).

Sheriff Will Masters (Daniel Oreskes) from beginning to end, calmly holds his little fief together and has his moment at the play’s end when he finally brings Bo to a moment of humility.

Leon Addison Brown as Virgil, B0’s longtime side-kick, who seeing things changing, urges Bo to go on without him, and direction-less, when the bus has pulled away, asks where the next one is going, remarks, “Albuquerque, I guess that’s as good a place as any,” a touching underplayed moment full of character.

This is a brief play of relatively narrow scope, giving a slice of provincial American life at a time when America was very different. But honest, genuine, full of echoes of lonliness and vulnerability, staunchly avoiding pathos and moving with speed and credibility.

The play is presented without intermission and runs under two hours. Scene changes are swift, accompanied by music from the four-piece orchestra in the balcony which also provides music for the impromptu stage-show the snowbound travelers engage in as they while away the night.

Revivals of relatively recent plays can be tricky. This one makes it all the way.

This summer’s palette at Williamstown makes one look forward with pleasure to what the summer of '06 will have in store. Meanwhile, an evening spent with the snowbound crew of Bus Stop is rewarding.

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