The Huntington Theatre Company's production of William Inge's "Bus Stop" is undeniably charming, bringing an idyllic winter scene from the Midwest to the Boston stage.
Nicholas Martin, who previously served as artistic director for Huntington, returns to direct the comedy of an eclectic group of travelers who find themselves stranded for the night at a Kansas roadside diner. It takes the entirety of the night for most of them to realize that the majority of them are searching for the same thing: love, in one of its many forms.
Despite the motley crew's eccentricities, the play fosters the idea that the characters all share a common ground of human desires, an argument that it pulls off with comic competence.
The characters' differences are blatantly obvious and inevitably stand in the way of them trying to understand one another. It is a mysterious night that brings a bus carrying a drunk professor with pedophilic impulses, a young and irascible hotshot cowboy with his older and wiser ranch hand, a 19−year−old nightclub singer and the lusty bus driver who gets them to a small diner about 30 miles west of Kansas City.
Grace Hoylard (Karen MacDonald) runs the small restaurant with the help of the teenage Elma Duckworth (Ronete Levenson). MacDonald is excellent in her portrayal, bringing hilarity to moments where it could have easily been lost and guiding Levenson's character around the diner and through the trials of adolescence.
Levenson is not as successful, perhaps falling into the trap of her character's ignorance and naiveté as Elma comes off as static and somewhat annoying. Her childlike qualities are so overemphasized that it's difficult to believe that she is supposed to be a high school student. Instead, Levenson's acting suggests that Elma has the maturity of a sixth− or seventh−grader.
The reduction in the appearance of Elma's age makes it all the more disturbing when the continually intoxicated middle−aged professor, Dr. Gerald Lyman (Henry Stram), reveals a sexual attraction to the young waitress. The inebriated and thrice−divorced intellectual is instantly obvious as a tormented soul, yet his constant self−deprecation and despicable behavior is sometimes endearing. Only a cleverly written script and Stram's masterful interpretation of the professor's witty language could pull off such a stunt.
The most predictable, if not clichéd, romance in the performance is also the most enjoyable. The equilibrium of the Kansas diner is instantly upset with the emergence of the night singer Cherie (Nicole Rodenburg) and the cowboy Bo Decker (Noah Bean), who is blindly set on marrying her. When the bus arrives, Cherie (or "Cherry," as Bo pronounces it) rushes inside the restaurant, hoping to ditch the cowboy Bo, who, she claims, kidnapped her in order to bring her to his ranch in Montana and marry her.
The duo is uniquely ridiculous; their characterizations are emphasized to a vaudevillian degree. Indeed, both characters are performers — Cherie sings at a nightclub and Bo competes in the rodeo — and both must learn to overcome appearances in order to really get to know the other.
Out of the entire ensemble, there are only two mature characters in the show: the sheriff, Will Masters (Adam LeFevre), and Bo's guardian, Virgil Blessing (Stephen Lee Anderson).
They act as advisors for the hotheaded Bo and the frivolous Cherie and are the purveyors of the truths in the play. Ironically, the two of them remain alone throughout the story, as if their knowledge and life experience are their true mates in life.
The production succeeds in capturing the spirit of the Midwest, if not its image.
The stage sports an impressive set that gives an apt view of the diner's inner workings but leaves out the feelings of isolation and emptiness that a snow−covered Kansas suggests. The set forces its audience to focus on the connection made between the characters during the night inside the restaurant, but it ignores the spaces that persist between certain characters in the play.
In the end, there is always one figure out in the cold, idly and solitarily waiting for a bus.
