Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

The core of William Inge’s reputation rests on four plays he wrote in the 1950s – Come Back Little Sheba, Picnic, Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Bus Stop. (Add to this the Oscar-winning screenplay he wrote for Elia Kazan’s 1961 film, Splendor in the Grass, and you have a pretty significant body of work.) He continued to write after this, but his later work didn’t find favor and, succumbing to depression, he committed suicide in 1960.

Before the pandemic, Jack Cummings III, the artistic director of the Transport Group, directed revivals of Sheba, Dark and Picnic. He finishes tagging the bases of the quartet with a co-production with CSC and the National Asian American Theater Company of Bus Stop. By happenstance, the production echoes aspects of the pandemic in that the play tells of a group of characters turned into a temporary pod by a snowstorm that forces them to share refuge in a bus stop in a small town in the west.

The play largely focuses on the characters’ contrasting attitudes about sex and relationships. The best-known character (by virtue of having been played by Kim Stanley on Broadway and Marilyn Monroe in the film adaptation) is Cherie, a less-than-dazzling nightclub singer with a long history of short-lived involvements with men on the move. Bo, a young and inexperienced cowboy, has spotted her performing in a dive during a visit to Kansas City and, convinced she is the one for him, has dragged her onto a bus heading toward his remote ranch. Not surprisingly, Cherie is not thrilled with being kidnapped and is trying to figure out how to get away from him. Bo’s sidekick and surrogate father is an older cowboy named Virgil who tries to persuade him that his only chance with Cherie is to moderate his behavior.

The bus stop is run by Grace, an independent middle-aged woman who both prizes her independence and likes the occasional company of a confident guy. The snowstorm offers her the chance to connect with Carl, the bus driver she’s had her eye on. The idea of a now-and-then arrangement seems to be just what both want.

Another passenger on the bus is a college philosophy professor named Dr. Lyman, who, despite his self-confessed brilliance, hasn’t been able to hold a job because of a weakness for drink and a kneejerk hostility to authority. He focuses his attentions on Elma, a high school girl working for Grace as a part-time waitress. We eventually learn that he has a history of focusing on inappropriately young women and, at the end of the play, we realize his attentions to Elma were but his latest attempt to prey on an innocent.

Also involved is Will, the local sheriff, who uses his office to enforce his own ideas of morality. He tries to step up only when he feels it is necessary. He compels Bo to relent, makes certain Dr. Lyman’s advances on Elma don’t get too far, and notes but doesn’t interfere with Grace and Carl’s hookup. He seems to be an agent of Inge’s will that everything turn out OK.

Even though Bo claims to have learned his lesson in the appropriate way to court Cherie (resulting in Cherie relenting and deciding to continue the ride to his ranch), I doubt that there is much of a future for them as a couple. I say this acknowledging that most of the audience probably wants her to go off with him. But then, for years audiences mostly have been exhilarated by the ending of the film version of Picnic showing Madge (Kim Novak) chasing after Hal (William Holden) to the accompaniment of George Duning’s soaring title theme, and I have always been convinced she was racing to disaster. (It turns out that this was an ending imposed on Inge during the production of the original play. In the alternate version he preferred, Summer Brave, Madge stays, having blown her chance of marrying a rich guy by sleeping with the vagrant Hal.)

Of course, my view is the product of my perspective and experience. One could argue that the characters Inge created would make choices shaped by their environment and values – an environment bred in the Fifties and values that many of us would now reject.

But isn’t this true of several of what we consider to be classic shows? A significant number of people now reject the ending Alan Jay Lerner chose for My Fair Lady and, indeed, the most recent Broadway revival ended with Eliza refusing to fetch Henry’s slippers and walking up an aisle and out of the theater. Language that was once deemed acceptable (in, for instance, The Front Page) is regularly pruned from contemporary revivals. Nobody I saw commented on how the current adaptation of Dorian Gray edited out the antisemitic depiction of a producer in Oscar Wilde’s original. (I have been told that some of Gene Hackman’s racist epithets have also been edited out of the current edition of The French Connection.)

In any case, though I think we necessarily view Bus Stop differently than the audiences who originally watched it and differently from the way Inge likely intended us to, there is value in seeing it today.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Inge put some of his own perspective into Lyman. Lyman is on the run for his sexual tastes, and, in a society that demonized homosexuality, Inge spent his career closeted (in contrast to the friend who discovered him and helped launch his career, Tennessee Williams). Lyman’s distaste of authority echoes Inge’s and, like Lyman, he struggled with alcoholism. It could be argued that Inge wants us to be charmed by Lyman’s humor and cultural references, but also that he agrees with the sheriff’s desire that Lyman move on. This suggests to me a touch of self-hatred.

If Cherie and Bo’s relationship is unlikely to flourish, and Lyman and Elma are perceived to be an unhealthy pairing, that leaves us with Grace and Carl. They seem to have settled on an occasional hook-up in between extended periods of independence. Is this Inge’s idea of a workable relationship? It’s the only relationship depicted in the play I think has a credible future.

The production is up to Jack Cummings’s standards. Being a collaboration with the National Asian American Theater Company, the cast is made up of Asian performers. This is not how Inge usually looks, but the cast is a strong one and I quickly focused on the characters and the relationships. Midori Francis finds a beguiling balance between cynicism and naivete for Cherie, Cindy Cheung is a no-nonsense Grace biting off quips as if she were biting off hunks of Twizzlers, and David Lee Huynh makes the sheriff a wise custodian of his authority. I don’t think it’s the strongest of Inge’s plays (I prefer Picnic), but I am glad to finally see a solid professional staging of the script.