BWW Reviews: Grab Your Coffee at the BUS STOP at Oyster Mill Playhouse

William Inge loved nothing more than the human condition, and especially the human condition of the Midwest. From PICNIC to COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA, he explored Middle America in the middle of the Twentieth Century - its foibles, its frustrations, and its relationships, some more secure than others, some more dysfunctional than anything outside of Tennessee Williams. Nowhere is that more evident than in the snow globe that is the confined winter set of BUS STOP, his 1955 work that copped four Tony nominations, and that is part of the glory that was Elaine Stritch on stage.

A busload of travelers is stranded at a diner for hours while snowbound roads are cleared. It's an opportunity for boredom, for humor, or for misery. All three occur to the various passengers and diner staff over their hours in the diner. The driver and diner owner, on the other hand, have an entirely different experience of the evening, and it's one that an audience can't help but root for. Director Lewis Silverman has the crowd in Grace Hoyland's diner on stage at Oyster Mill Playhouse, where their crossed paths result in funny, sad, and frightening complications. Grace, whose husband disappeared years ago, runs the diner at night with the help of high-schooler Emma. Susan Wray Danowitz is Grace, and she plays her with a sure hand with a coffee pot, a hard-won understanding of the ways of the world, and the guts to go for those small things she can find to make her happy. Emma is played by Paije Carbonell, who as a ninth-grader has an amazing way with a stage. She plays Emma with a combination of book learning from school and naivete about the real world outside it, which opens her up to the exciting whiff of danger as the night progresses. Also from town is Sheriff Will Masters, a perfectly cast Rob Allison, who knows the law, understands people, and, though he's a God-fearing church deacon, realizes the differences between running his show by the law versus by the Bible.

Jim Clark plays Carl, the bus driver. He's not on stage much; everyone else may be eating and chatting in the diner, but Carl has other things to do. He's got to have a cup of coffee, flirt with Grace, and "take a walk" for most of the show; the audience may try guessing what he's really doing, but won't find their suspicions confirmed or ruined until the end. He's brought an odd lot on the bus with him, all of whom need a meal and something to drink, as well as something to find in their lives. Jeremy Burkett is neatly cast as the obnoxious Bo, the young cowboy with some rodeo rope tricks and a ranch in Montana. He's accompanied by his older friend and mentor, Virgil (in a wonderful, sad, but unsentimental performance by Joe Carr) - Bo's counterpart to Grace for Emma - who's been on the rodeo trail with him, and with Cherie (an amazing turn by Miranda Baldys), a sweet but not-so-innocent night club singer who says she's being dragged away, possibly kidnapped, by Bo. It's ham-fisted, brutish beast of a cowboy and beauty of a silly but wise-to-the-ways-of-the world girl, whose experience of the world but lack of education makes her a total contrast to Emma.

Also on the bus is Dr. Gordon Lyman, former university professor turned traveler, a man who's rebelled against authority later in life rather than earlier, too soon in the century and too long in the tooth to claim to be a Beat or a hippie, but who has taken to wandering the roads as his new profession and to drinking as his primary entertainment. He's beautifully played by Gordon Einhorn as a formerly upper-crust, moderately well-dressed, bum who can drink and complain about Schopenhauer at the same time to a group of people who couldn't care less. Perhaps the high moment of a delightful production is his drunken effort, with Emma, to entertain the others in the diner by performing the balcony scene in ROMEO AND JULIET with a little assistance from Virgil. Alas, one of the intentionally low moments follows later, when Lyman tries to conspire with the underaged Emma for him to meet her out of town the next weekend, an idea in which Emma doesn't recognize danger.

However, the real story is that of Bo and Cherie, and whether the sheriff should take Bo in for kidnapping, among other things. Cherie emerges from the bus looking for help, while Bo is trying to find a Justice of the Peace so he can have Cherie marry him while they wait for the bus. It's in the Bo story that Allison shines as the sheriff, including in a knock-down, drag-out fight in which the rodeo cowboy learns what tough actually means. BUS STOP was originally held to be a rather comic play. Although it certainly has its moments, it's clear that the awkward, fighting, conflicted relationship between Bo and Cherie was much funnier to an audience sixty years ago than it is now - audience members may find themselves thinking that Grace should have the women's shelter phone number on the wall near the pay phone. The actual outcome of the situation is lampshaded throughout the play, so there's no surprise in it, but a modern audience may find it slightly disappointing rather than amusing.

The set is a charmer; it's a perfect Fifties diner, with glass-covered stands of doughnuts, coffee pots, and red-and-chrome stools at a counter where coffee and doughnuts go down pretty easily on a long, cold night. What was contemporary sixty years ago screams of happy comfort food and delicious smells these days, and in the small Oyster Mill house, it feels as if the audience is sitting with Grace and her bus patrons in the other side of the diner. The only thing missing is one's own cup of coffee and five cent doughnut.

It's been asked before if BUS STOP is dated. It's not so much that the play, which is as well-crafted as any of Inge's gems, is dated as that it's nostalgic. "Dated" is watching Zigfield's Follies and realizing that shows are in no way constructed like that now. Because something is set in what was contemporary at the time but is now past doesn't itself date a show. What BUS STOP does do, however, is show us how our perceptions have changed in the past sixty years. We immediately recognize, as audiences did then, that Cherie will end up with Bo, but what was considered a comic pre-relationship conflict portrayal then is domestic violence now, and Cherie's leaving with Bo at the end is not so charming and amusing as reflective of her unwillingness to perceive abuse. Certainly the free-flowing "passing through" relationship between diner owner Grace and bus driver Carl is neither as funny now, nor as eyebrow-raising, as sixty years ago, but it's now something both socially acceptable to the audience and rather charming in its middle-aged-romance way. On the other hand, Dr. Lyman's not-so-subtle flattery of and invitations to high-schooler Emma were creepy then, and now simply identified as pedophilic; some things never change. It's clear at the end of the show that he's what we used to call "a pervert" - the language has changed, but the outrage hasn't.

There's not nearly enough Inge on area stages, or elsewhere, these days. Kudos to Silverman for putting this bus on the road to Oyster Mill so it can pull over at Grace's. More kudos for some excellent casting and some fine acting. BUS STOP is the sort of playwriting that you study for everything that's perfect in the show's construction, and when it's given the right cast, it almost sings.

Writing. Staging. Sets. Some great acting and some powerfully-delivered scenes. This is why you go to the theatre.

On stage at Oyster Mill Playhouse through June 7. Call 717-737-6768 or visit www.oystermill.com for tickets and information.

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