Eclipse Theater’s season of Inge continues at the Athenaeum with a mild adaptation of one of his most famous works, Bus Stop. The current production, running through August 19th, captures a sense of the times before digging to find how desperation and hope can sometimes lead to positive outcomes.
Debuting in the early 50’s, the play was an immediate sensation inspiring Hollywood to turn it into box office gold a few years later. Starring Marilyn Monroe, it took advantage of the actress’s innate fragility to expose an essential truth about human nature. With few exceptions, we all want to be desired, wanted or needed.
A regular stop on a bus route through Kansas, with its checkerboard tiled floor and footed donut platter, Grace’s Café is pure Americana. There are few frills but the basics are generally well covered and follow the taste of the proprietor, Grace Hoyland (Sarah Bright). Elma (Jillian Warden), a bright, naïve and sheltered high school kid who part times at the café is helping get ready for the bus coming in from Topeka. There’s a brutal winter storm raging outside, the telephone lines are down and the bus, when it makes it to the café, will not be able to leave very quickly because the road ahead is impassable.
It’s here in this sanctuary a fateful struggle is about the take place. A woman is trying to escape from a man. In its original writing, Inge incorporated a strong sense of menace and foreboding as he opened his vignette. There are flashes of the same suspense here, but they are quickly overwhelmed by wholesome intentions and the charming residue of innocence just as it’s about to be shed.
Cherie (Daniella Pereira) is the first of the four passengers to get blown shivering and distraught into the bus stop. Still dressed in her performance togs, a short slinky one piece from her act as a chanteuse in a nightclub, she’s convincing and hungry. It’s clear that the nightclub probably isn’t much more than a dive and; through her hill country accent, that Cherie is her stage name. One of the nightclub’s customers, a cowboy from Montana, is on the bus too and she tells everyone in the diner, including the town sheriff Will (Tim Kough), that she’s been abducted and is afraid for her well-being.
Bus Stop then becomes a vehicle to show how universal the desire to be wanted really is. As the other characters are introduced, it slowly becomes apparent how most of them have a void they’d like to see filled. Whether it’s Bo (Anthony Conway) the young cowboy who is indeed uncouth, loud and perpetually inappropriate or Dr. Lyman (Ted Hoerl), the brilliant but tragically failed philosophy professor whose love of rye whiskey and young girls has rendered him a sad, but very amusing, caricature. They all have a gnawing hunger for something more.
Although Inge may have spun the tale more darkly than this rendering, both stir in enough hope to eventually turn sour into sweet. Bo’s youth, he’s only 21, and ignorance about women are the agents that turn his fear into boorishness. If it weren’t for his older wiser wingman and fellow cowboy, Virgil, neatly played by Zach Bloomfield, Bo would indeed be a menace to society. Inexplicably and hopelessly inexperienced in the ways of romance, he “couldn’t kiss a woman he didn’t love”.
The awkward and rambunctious back and forth between Cherie and Bo runs parallel to other less volatile romantic intrigues being played out in the diner. Grace and the bus driver Carl (Matt Thinnes) are establishing a regular and casual sexual relationship. That there are no strings attached or expectations is mutually preferred.
Elma and the professor are another story. She’s enchanted by his intellect and hasn’t a clue about the possibility of a salacious side in his interest in her. He’s been through three wives and run out of town for taking advantage of young girls. None of that is apparent in his behavior toward her. He openly admires the freshness of her youth and uses it only to enlighten rather than seduce.
This Bus Stop also held a small casting surprise. Choosing to ditch the option of blind casting, it was decided to simply make Bo a black cowboy. Virgil commented on how Bo was restless as a panther and another member of the cast mentioned how much he looked like Sidney Poitier. What matters is that Conway made a great Bo. When he told Cherie that he was “virgin enough for both of them”, he became as huggable as Santa to a five-year-old. Pereira’s Cherie was just as appealing. A little girl hiding inside the body of a worldly too soon young woman, all she really wants is to find a man who could show her respect as well as a good time. Cast strength seems to be an Eclipse specialty. When the curtain rose on the second act, this one held together like an impenetrable wall.
Bus Stop
July 12 – August 19, 208
Eclipse Theatre Company
2936 N. Southport Ave.
Chicago, IL 60657
773-935-6875
eclipsetheatre.com