Review: Don't Forget William Inge, Suggests New Revival of Bus Stop

In the 1950s, William Inge was considered a giant alongside the likes of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller on the basis of plays like Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop. While revivals by the latter two playwrights continue to be quite common, those of Inge have been less frequent since his heyday, an aura of quaintness having settled on his oeuvre. One of the most valuable things about director Jack Cummings III’s solid new revival of Bus Stop—a coproduction with Classic Stage Company, the National Asian American Theatre Company, and Cummings’s own Transport Group—is the degree to which it forces us to reassess its creator’s faded reputation.

All the action takes place in a diner in a small Kansas town which serves as a rest stop for passing bus lines. The diner is owned by Grace Hoylard (Cindy Cheung), with teen Elma Duckworth (Delphi Borich) working as a waitress under her. Into their unassuming spot one night bursts the driver, Carl (David Shih), and passengers of a Topeka-bound bus stuck there because of a blizzard. Among the occupants are Cherie (Midori Francis), a nightclub singer; two cowboys, Bo Decker (Michael Hsu Rosen) and Virgil Blessing (Moses Villarama); and Dr. Gerald Lyman (Rajesh Bose), a former college professor. The town’s sheriff, Will Masters (David Lee Huynh), occasionally pops in to keep a close eye on all of them.

The most prominent dramatic arc revolves around Cherie’s attempts to escape the clutches of Bo, who is forcing her to marry him even though she doesn’t love him. But other interpersonal dramas grace this claustrophobic canvas. Dr. Lyman comes onto Elma in ways that are overtly predatory, even if Elma is oblivious to them. The unhappily married Grace flirts with Carl and then disappears for a long stretch to presumably hook up with him. And though Virgil acts as a father figure to the younger, brasher Bo, there are hints throughout of a much deeper affection he has for him.

Though Williams might have blown these conflicts up into hothouse melodramas, Inge keeps them grounded in working-class realism. And yet, there are depths to be discovered beneath the unassuming surface. These characters are, at heart, lonely souls, with this rest stop becoming an arena in which they find ways to connect, reckon with inner demons, and possibly find a better way forward. Even if Inge was speaking directly to the 1950s, hinting at the darkness belying the decade’s clean-cut family-first image, surely that sense of people living out lives of quiet desperation still carries timeless, universal resonance. Knowing that Inge himself was a closeted homosexual adds an even greater pathos to the way he grapples with toxic masculinity and sexual dalliances in Bus Stop.

Cummings has enough trust in the text and his ensemble to not adorn his production with too many extraneous bells and whistles. Scenic designer Peiyi Wong’s design of the diner, especially with the pastel-blue shade underneath the bar top, skillfully evokes small-town Americana, with R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting design adding to the Edward Hopper-like ambiance. Mariko Ohigashi’s costume design, ranging from Dr. Lyman’s brown suit to Virgil’s rugged checkered shirt and Grace and Elma’s bright-yellow aprons, simultaneously evokes the period and the characters’ interior states.

Perhaps it’s obligatory to note this production’s all-Asian American cast, suggesting the possibility of viewing this play from a fresh cultural perspective. That never quite materializes in the production, but when the performances are as well-calibrated as most of these are, that hardly matters.

Francis may not perfectly maintain her Southern accent, but she nails Cherie’s innocent side underlying the world-weary exterior. So does Rosen, finding a core of touching naïveté to a character whose behavior many would find inexcusably macho. Bose crafts a memorable portrait of a blustery yet charming lecher full of self-loathing, while Villarama is similarly affecting as a character who, by contrast, keeps his feelings hidden.

Cheung plays Grace with scene-stealing vigor, especially in her flirtations with Shih. Huynh may look too boyish and petite to fulfill Inge’s description of Will as “huge,” “saturnine,” and “somewhat forbidding,” but he partly compensates by adopting a slightly deeper-than-usual voice and exuding a calm sense of seen-it-all authority. By comparison, Borich has no trouble embodying the girlishness of her character, desiring a glimpse of an adult world just outside her reach.

It’s a tribute to the strengths of Inge’s play itself—one that deserves not to be buried among its flashier, more cutting-edge brethren—that simply performing the text with skill and sensitivity proves to be enough.