Staging a ‘Bus’ Worth Waiting For

Motto of the week: All good plays come to those who wait. Eight years ago, Warner Shook directed a one-night reading of “Bus Stop”; tonight, his staging of the William Inge classic--starring Lea Thompson as the lovable Cherie--opens at the Pasadena Playhouse. “At that time, the rights weren’t available,” Shook explained of the project’s long gestation period. “But I always knew I wanted to do it.”

In spite of his fondness for the piece, the director (“Sister Mary Ignatius,” “Breaking the Silence”) admitted that he has never seen another staging of it--or even the famous movie version with Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray.

“I know it was made,” he quipped. “I also know it was very different. So many people identify the role of Cherie with Marilyn Monroe. I think we’ve gotten farther and farther away from Inge’s original image. As he (wrote) her, she’s 19, a runaway from the Ozarks. He describes her as funny and bird-like, not a voluptuary. She’s manufactured herself based on what she’s seen in the movies and heard on the radio.”

The ‘50s-set story finds eight people trapped in a diner by bad weather, “each looking for compassion and understanding in different ways. We all want that. Sometimes in this mechanized world we live in, we forget those things. But this is so pure. Inge takes a long look into the human heart--and various kinds of love: idealized love, romantic love, perverted love, convenient love.”

With “Bus Stop” on track, Shook (who is recently back from the Singapore Arts Festival, where he re-staged South Coast Repertory’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”) is off to Seattle to direct Brian Friel’s “Aristocrats.” Then comes an episode of TV’s “Monsters” in New York, followed by “You Can’t Take It With You” at SCR in January. “It’s not that bad,” the director said of his busy schedule. “I’m actually going to take December off.”

THEATER BUZZ: Mum’s the word at Avnet-Kerner Productions, where a stage-to-screenplay treatment of Pierre Corneille’s “The Illusion”--recently given a splendid staging at Los Angeles Theatre Center--is underway.

Tony Kushner (“Millennium Approaches”), who adapted the work, is reportedly set to script, though there are said to be numerous changes anticipated--particularly in the picture-frame staging, which will give way to a more traditional swashbuckler/fairy-tale romance. With the deal yet to be signed and sealed, Avnet-Turner is not returning phone calls, but according to our inside source, “a green light is close at hand.”