A stormy night in a lonely café. That’s how it starts in William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop,” an existential paean to sex in the American Midwest. The play is a little bit like an Edward Hopper painting come to life, plus sex. The show is soon to close at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos. The last two performances are today and Saturday at 8 p.m.
In Inge’s play a storm on a highway out in the middle of nowhere stalls an interstate bus. Waiting all night for the road to clear, eight people hang out together in a homey cafe.
This odd cabal of misfits includes a rowdy Montana rodeo cowboy and his ranch foreman, a drunken Ivy League literature professor with an eye for young girls, a dizzy blonde cabaret singer with a shady past, the town’s local sheriff, the cafe owner and her high-school-age waitress, and the bus driver. The eight hash over their takes on love and sex.
Kansas-born and -educated Inge was the 1940s and 1950s Midwest Americana playwright. “Bus Stop,” which ran on Broadway for more than a year, tried to reveal what normal Americans actually thought about sex in the 1950s.
You may recall the official position was that normal Americans didn’t think about sex in the 1950s. “Bus Stop” also turns out to be a morality tale about the self-acknowledgement of bad behavior, the making of amends, and ensuing personal and social transformation.
Director Jeanie K. Forte’s Los Altos production struggles. For much of its first half the characters feel like types and not people. Inge’s expositionally loaded dialogue makes the acting task difficult.
The rodeo cowboy (Charles McKeithan) and the dizzy blond singer (Robyn Winslow), for example, play out in key scenes as rather cartoony simpletons, making it difficult to take their romantic issues seriously. McKeithan performs much of his role with a self-conscious smirk that impairs an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.
Further compounding the challenges of staging this play is a structure in which characters perform a scene, then recede into the onstage background silently while other characters step forward. During these unmotivated silent segments, the characters feel like they are posing.
A lack of technical effects for communicating the idea of a storm outside also contributes to a sense that the play is an abstraction, and not real. Scenic designer Ron Gasparinetti’s detailed 1955 cafe set is a plus.
Things change about two-thirds of the way through the evening when a young waitress (Alexandra Miller) organizes the cafe slackers into a talent show. Here the ranch foreman (K. Michael Riley) plays the guitar, the professor (Dirk Leatherman) and waitress perform the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” and the blond chanteuse sings from her cabaret act.
That floor show, followed by an emotional character breakdown and an ensuing fight, transforms both characters and audience, knocking everyone out of self-absorbed lethargy. It’s a big shift. The play has a strong ending.
But it’s rather little, rather late. And where does it all lead? As the driver of the bus puts it when the storm breaks and the play moves towards its conclusion, “Next stop, Topeka.”
E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.
