The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: CSC’s Bus Stop
By Ross
Loneliness and love, two subtle but powerful constructs that rule the world and our senses, making us all act foolish and desperate at times, mostly because many of us don’t really know the true meaning of either, or how they actually feel. We’re too busy, at least these days, seeking validation to push those thoughts away, as both are too dangerous to really hold tight. Many might believe they know what love feels like. But looking at that pretty cowboy who forcibly takes a beautiful woman he wants against her will onto a bus back to his home to marry her, it’s clear that sometimes lust gets mixed up with love. A moment of reflection and insight is needed before the world gets torn apart. This is somewhat the formula for William Inge’s Bus Stop, now getting a proper and purposeful production at Classic Stage Company in coordination with Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) and Transport Group, when, in a moment for observation and reflection because of a storm of emotions and the Midwest elements, a slight pause could help that cowboy look around at the idea of love. Inside that sanctuary from the cold, lies a hope for insight and understanding, and the road to a better, or at least clearer, future might open up before him.
Solitude, something the world is experiencing more and more with every new gadget created, is the fuel that drives this Bus Stop bus forward. It is in its pausing where the true upheaval and reformation can occur, where the concept of love can be rewired, and the sad melody of loss can be sung out silently in the corner. Bus Stop is that space for reflection, when a ferocious snowstorm forces a bus to stop in its tracks at a small diner about 25 miles west of Kansas City. The passengers have to disembark for a much longer period of cooldown than the bus schedule suggested. Each of the quasi-romantic relationships that are formed, rewired, enflamed, and destroyed during that four-hour forced layover plays a role in this solid revival, expanding our views and entrancing us in their unpacking and rebuilding.
The purgatory of the diner, well crafted by the fascinating playwright Inge (Picnic; Come Back, Little Sheba), creates a bubble of confinement that drives each of the characters to contemplate and learn about the balance of loneliness and love. And not just the two larger-than-life pseudo-leads that embark on the most enflamed deconstruction of love. It’s all ignited by the abduction of Cherie, played to perfection by Midori Francis (LCT’s The Wolves), a pretty young aspiring nightclub singer (we can instantly see why Marilyn Monroe was cast in the 1956 film version), by the “hot headed fool” and star cowboy, Bo Decker, played fascinatingly by Michael Hsu Rosen (2ST/Broadway’s Torch Song), who mascarades as tough, when he really is as naive about love as the young diner waitress, Elma, played beautifully by Delphi Borich (Broadway’s Into the Woods), who serves up coffee and romantic ideals of what love should sound like and look like. Elma’s formulation of love comes from her high school English class and their readings of Shakespeare, whereas Bo treats his wanna-be bride, Cherie, as just another farm animal who must be tied up and branded to be tamed, whether they like it or not.
The problem is, Cherie doesn’t want anything to do with him, beyond the momentary physical attraction she had the night they met. She dreams of something else that lives inside the seductive songs she sings at the dive bar, but it’s also tainted by her giving it away and not really receiving anything real in return. In the way she inhabits loneliness, she is more like the diner’s owner, Grace Hoylard, tightly and wisely portrayed by Cindy Cheung (PH’s The Antiquities), but without the starry-eyed dreaminess. When asked, “Where’s your husband now?” Grace answers with a telling, “How should I know?” Her empty apartment above the diner is “just as lonely when he was there,” yet she also knows about her needs and desires, almost as much as she understands her love for a good cowboy fist fight.
The complications of seduction come into a more disturbing light with the unraveling of the lusty, old man stereotype, Dr. Lyman, played intelligently by Rajesh Bose (Broadway’s Life of Pi), who sees beauty in the young waitress, but needs his bottle to try to enact his Romeo and Juliet seduction scene. He utilizes the diner’s countertop as a balcony that becomes too out of reach for the doctor to climb, and he tumbles down into despair. But there is love that hangs on the edges of this celebrated play, staring with uncertainty into the future with a quiet pleading heart and a tear in its eye. Carl, the good-natured bus driver, played solidly by David Shi (Broadway’s Life of Pi), has his winking eye on Grace, who plays with the flirtations as expertly as anyone in the room. She owns herself as solidly as the diner, enfusing the space with her presence and matter-of-fact knowingness about the power, pleasure, pain, and price of love and of work. In their connection, there is a certain affection that feels more honest than on fire.
“I was a headstrong brat, had to have it my own way,” she adds in a carefully deconstructed admission to self, that many in that room could have used. But it’s Virgil Blessing, played heroically by Moses Villarama (Broadway’s Here Lies Love), where the truth of love lies most knowingly within. Yet, it is inside that quiet, older, and wiser cowboy, who is seen as a father figure by Bo (who was orphaned at the age of 10), that the truth of sacrifice and honor of true love resides. It strums itself quietly to sleep and resides silently in his heart, as we watch him navigate his horizon where loneliness lives inside of love. His framing is where we learn about what that feeling and stance actually look and feel like, or at least one version of it. Not in the poetic formulations of the doomed love of Shakespearean tragedy, but in the sacrifice and careful consideration of honor and care.
There is a great deal of talk around loneliness and disconnection, a theme this modern culture probably knows more about than ever before. It’s not unsurprising that those unspoken accents of unrequited love appear strumming their sad song within Inge’s unravelings. His connection to these feelings is subtly rope-tied into many of his plays and lives inside a closeted framing that can be seen often in plays from this period. Still, the cast, as directed by Jack Cummings III (Old Globe/Paper Mill’s Benny & Joon), deliver their lines with care, but also as if they are in some old-time foreign depiction of an American Western. They speak as if they are in a different time frame, giving us a detached view from the outside looking in, and sometimes that disconnect takes us out of the emotional core.
Constructs around societal rejection and the feelings of remoteness reside in the diner, but as directed, for a show that wants to dig into the conflicts of the Asian American identity and experience alongside Midwestern hyper-Americana, co-produced with intent by the National Asian American Theatre Company, the play rarely unpacks the dilemma with any added clarity or revisionary stances. It fills the space with a put-upon retreat from a naturalistic approach, sounding self-conscious and somehow disconnected, except for the strong presence of handsome Officer Will Masters, portrayed masterfully by Đavid Lee Huynh (Gingold’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession), and Cheung’s Grace, who together are as clear and well constructed as that diner.
Yet as a piece of revivalist theatre, it works its well crafted magic on us, thanks to the solid structural work of set designer Peiyi Wong (Sinking Ship/Theater in Quarantine‘s The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux]), the focused lighting by R. Lee Kennedy (CSC’s Summer and Smoke), and the clearminded costumes by Mariko Ohigashi (Public’s SUMO). Bus Stop doesn’t spin off-road into a ditch, finding its way thoughtfully through the twists and turns of some complicated proclamations of love and desire. It navigates some disturbing possible exits like sexual abduction and pedophilia, without ever stalling the engine of this old-time vehicle. There’s a shadow of a different kind of love and attachment, and a knowingness that sometimes gets left out in the cold. “I knew this was gonna happen all the time,” but in those tears at the end, Bus Stop tells us everything we need to know about love and loss, and “it’s been an honor to know you” all through that lens.
