O.C. STAGE REVIEW : ‘Bus Stop’ Never Gets Going : Laguna Playhouse offers a great-looking production of the William Inge play, but without gusto from the ensemble cast.

In real estate, it’s location , location , location. In William Inge’s plays it’s texture , texture , texture.

Unlike Tennessee Williams, his idol, Inge never wrote larger-than-life characters. He never wrote the sort of poetry that could pass for natural speech. He never wrote plays with much plot in them.

What Inge did was to keep an honest record of the world he came from: a repressed Midwest society layered with ordinary people alienated from themselves or others. He traced their reality with scrupulous attention to the details of their lonely lives and of their inevitably obscure destinies.

Whether Inge’s plays are lasting works of art or mere period pieces to be dusted off and revived as reminders of a bygone era is beside the point. As the director and critic Harold Clurman once noted, “Even if they should not prove to be art, they are necessary. “

It was Clurman, in fact, who staged the original Broadway production of “Bus Stop,” now being revived by the Laguna Playhouse at the Moulton Theatre in a faithful if somewhat lackluster version that looks wonderful but plays a little less so. The show premiered Thursday night.

Some reviewers of the original, such as Brooks Atkinson, have called “Bus Stop” the finest dramatic work of Inge’s career, prizing it more highly than “Picnic” or “Come Back, Little Sheba” or “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”

Doubtless, Atkinson was influenced by Clurman’s staging--which is said to have “relished” the play’s humor and the humanity--and by the “gusto” of an ensemble of character actors that included Kim Stanley and Elaine Stritch making their marks early in their careers.

Gusto and relish, however, are not the sort of terms that apply to this amateur production of “Bus Stop.” Substitute sturdy for Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle’s staging and, with several exceptions, unseasoned for the performances.

Barnicle clearly knows how to stage the play. But the resources at his disposal are limited when it comes to solving one of its basic problems. He must fill the production with that all-important texture--which can only come from actors capable of intrinsically interesting behavior--if he is to keep the plotless action from congealing into artificiality.

“Bus Stop” revolves around a handful of travelers who are forced off the road by a Kansas blizzard and marooned at a small-town diner for a few hours until the highway ahead can be cleared. But while the play ultimately focuses on the comic romance between a third-rate nightclub singer and a rowdy Montana cowboy, everybody else rates just about equal time in the limelight.

As a result, “Bus Stop” unfolds in a string of self-revealing monologues or conversations between paired-off characters, during which the rest of the ensemble is left to stand or sit, putter or ruminate. But whatever it is they do when they’re not stage center, they must make believe they’re more animated than the furniture, or at least disguise the fact that they aren’t dead.

In a play with such dramaturgical inertia, seasoned character actors possessing that indefinable quality called “edge” are a director’s lifeline. And in “Bus Stop,” which is nothing if not a democratic convention of oddball transients and rooted small-towners, a dynamic ensemble is the sine qua non for success, just as it is in such different but equally plotless plays as William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life” or Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”

That said, whenever Betsy Ferguson holds forth with her thick hillbilly twang as Cherie, the chanteuse from the Ozarks by way of the Blue Dragon nightclub in Kansas City, “Bus Stop” gets a strong dose of local color. Perhaps with time she will inject more personality into the role and rely less on that accent to bring out Cherie’s comic poignancy.

Opposite her as Bo, the smitten rodeo champ who can’t help riding roughshod over Cherie’s feelings, David Lamb gives a high-energy performance full of promise, but one that never quite escapes the aura of a Sunday cowboy from the suburbs. Although he radiates the proper innocence, he lacks the bite of the prairie.

As Dr. Lyman, the self-hating lush and former college professor with a taste for Shakespeare and young girls, Michael Bielitz succeeds best in creating a fully realized character. He brings theatrical flair to the role, which matches cynicism and heartbreak to the idealism of the teen-age waitress, Elma, who is played with an eager naturalness by Erin Lander.

Meanwhile, Jacquie Moffett provides deft strokes as the diner owner, Grace, the kind of woman who has to have a man occasionally “to keep from getting grouchy.” She gives the production a lift whenever she’s on stage. And her opposite, Timothy P.J. McKee, sketches in the bus driver Carl very nicely. It’s too bad both of their characters are off stage most of the time making whoopie.

Lack of experience shows the most in two other key roles: the town sheriff Will, played rather stiffly by David Mahler; and the ultimate lonesome cowboy, Virgil, played by Thom Taylor with an awkwardness that might fit the character if it weren’t actor’s discomfort we were watching.

The set design by Gary May is flawless, capturing the rural feel of a roadside diner. And the costumes are apt (though I wonder about Cherie’s Princess Di coiffure).

Perhaps the only technical aspect that seemed lacking, if I may quibble further, is the absence of the blizzard. Despite an occasional rumble of the wind and the steady snowfall in the darkness outside the diner window (a typically diligent Playhouse touch), nature seems little more than a distant rumor.

Somehow, the blizzard should be sensed implicitly as an all-engulfing force dwarfing humanity and even ready to snuff it out with indifference. It’s not for nothing that an earlier version of “Bus Stop” was entitled “People in the Wind.”

‘Bus Stop’

Erin Lander: Elma Duckworth

Jacquie Moffett: Grace Hoylard

David Mahler: Will Masters

Betsy Ferguson: Cherie

Michael Bielitz: Gerald Lyman

Timothy P.J. McKee: Carl

Thom Taylor Virgil: Blessing

David Lamb: Bo Decker

A Laguna Playhouse presentation of William Inge’s play. Directed by Andrew Barnicle. Set design by Gary May. Lighting by David William Hudnall. Costumes by Jacqueline Dalley. Sound by David Edwards. Through Oct. 11 at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Performances are Tuesdays to Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. $14 to $19. (714) 494-8021.