This ‘Bus Stop’ Is Worthy of a Visit

For about 20 minutes, William Inge’s “Bus Stop” can fool you into thinking it’s a cozy little slice of down-home Americana, a Norman Rockwell tableaux vivant with a willfully naive worldview. But somewhere midway through Act 1, this under-performed Corn Belt classic shifts into darker and chillier terrain, a place that’s pretty to look at but tinged with rueful humor and even outright despair.

Written in 1954, but spiritually closer to the Great Depression, “Bus Stop” is the theatrical answer to Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” a primal American scene raised to mythopoeic levels and transposed from the anonymous city to the anonymous Midwestern heartland, where no one is ever more than a degree or two of separation from crippling, terminal loneliness. That includes the playwright, who committed suicide in 1973.

In the faithful and tenderly nuanced production that opened Friday at A Noise Within, director Sabin Epstein and company draw us into the fleeting warmth of this old-fashioned, solidly crafted work about four motley passengers stranded by a blizzard at a Kansas crossroads cafe.

The characters--a cowboy, a college professor, a nightclub singer, a young waitress and the rest--seem as familiar and inevitable as the homey interior of Grace’s Diner, perfectly realized in Thomas Buderwitz’s weathered yet picturesque set design with its leather stools, frosted windows and battered appliances (love that copper cake tin, by the way), and lighted with rustic naturalism by Don Guy.

“Bus Stop,” of course, is Inge’s re-imagining of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” a pilgrimage along America’s blue highways, and its theme, like Chaucer’s, is love in all its lusty, reckless, comic, self-sacrificing and unrequited guises.

Though Inge had a tendency to post his ideas like Burma Shave signs, Epstein wisely keeps both hands on the wheel and his eyes locked on character development.

The play’s motivational linchpin is the lovers’ brawl between the rowdy knight-errant Bo Decker (Ben Messmer), a brash Montana cowboy, and his reluctant damsel in distress, Cherie (Abby Craden), who sings at the Blue Dragon Nightclub in Kansas City, “out by the stockyards,” and wishes real life could be more like a Hollywood movie. Determined to drag his ambivalent “fiancee” back home to Big Sky country, kicking and screaming if necessary, Bo quickly runs afoul of the local sheriff, Cherie pours out her soul to the diner’s captive audience, and the play’s lesser romantic subplots dutifully take their cues from the main action.

Marilyn Monroe proved her acting chops playing Cherie in the 1956 film version of “Bus Stop,” in one of those little-girl-lost turns that can steal a show. Few actresses can match Monroe’s breathy neuroticism, but Craden is every bit as funny, steely and self-consciously pneumatic, teetering around in red pumps and fishnets while making chanteuse rhyme with “floozy.” There’s a palpably dangerous erotic current flowing between her and Messmer’s Bo, very credible as a befuddled bull-in-a-china-shop--the vulnerable, sensitive American antihero that hadn’t yet found its champion in James Dean.

Offsetting the central lovers’ feud, A Noise Within gets lively ensemble work from Deborah Strang as the wisecracking, world-weary Grace; Lana Joy as her precocious kitchen helper; William Dennis Hunt as a self-dramatizing professor with a soft spot for young folks; Richard Soto as a bus driver with a one-track mind; and Robert Pescovitz as Sheriff Will, a low-key pillar of prairie righteousness. Like figures in a WPA mural, they’re ordinary Americans thrown into higher relief by the stoic humor and grace with which they bear their hardships.

But the production’s most affecting performance is Mark Bramhall’s Virgil, a crusty old cowboy who plays spiritual guide to Bo, his love-struck surrogate son. Looking like a cross between the Marlboro Man and a scarecrow, Bramhall locates a sweetness and hard-earned decency in Virgil, echoing a production in which feelings run deep, though the sentiments never get more explicit than “damnation” and “shucks.”

Inge’s talky, three-act odyssey is always in danger of overstaying its welcome, fooling you with more false climaxes than a Tchaikovsky symphony.

By the time “Bus Stop’s” road warriors are set to depart, we’re ready to rejoin them in the cold, cruel world--but grateful for having the chance to sit and warm our souls for a spell.

*

A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Wednesday, Thursday, 8 p.m.; April 19, 24, 25, May 2, 3, 8 p.m.; April 20, May 4, 18, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; May 12, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Ends May 18. $22-$38. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

‘Bus Stop’

Elma Duckworth...Lana Joy

Grace...Deborah Strang

Will Masters...Robert Pescovitz

Cherie...Abby Craden

Dr. Gerald Lyman...William Dennis Hunt

Carl...Richard Soto

Virgil Blessing...Mark Bramhall

Bo Decker...Ben Messmer

By William Inge. Directed by Sabin Epstein. Set by Thomas Buderwitz. Lighting by Don Guy. Costumes by Angela Balogh Calin. Stage manager James Karr.