Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✭✩
by William Inge, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 15-November 27, 2005
"Lives at an Impasse"
In 2001 the Shaw Festival had a major hit with William Inge’s “Picnic” directed by Jackie Maxwell, now the Festival’s Artistic Director. This year Maxwell directs Inge’s follow-up to “Picnic” (1953), “Bus Stop” from 1955. Both plays are about loneliness and the many varieties of love. Both feature a brash, attractive young man and a girl who must decide if she will or will not run away with him. Yet, if “Bus Stop” proves to be a less intense experience than “Picnic”, it is because the later play is resolves its questions in comedy, whereas the events in “Picnic” are framed as tragedy.
As is mentioned twice in the programme notes, “Bus Stop” has virtually no plot. Inge wrote, “I regard a play as a composition rather than a story, as a distillation of life rather than a narration of it”. The play uses a device as old as the “Canterbury Tales” (referred to in the play) or Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, in observing the interactions of an isolated and varied group of travellers. In this case, the bus from Kansas City to Topeka has had to stop on the way overnight at Grace’s Diner because a snow storm has closed the road. The town residents we meet are Grace and Elma, the high school girl Grace employs, and Will, the town sheriff. Arriving in town are the bus driver Carl, a former professor Dr. Gerald Lyman, Cherie a nightclub “chanteuse” and two cowboys from Montana, Bo, an award winner at the rodeo, and his lifelong friend Virgil.
During the course of the action, Grace and Carl have their first sexual liaison, while Lyman, a suspected pervert with a predilection for young girls, chats up Elma with the goal of meeting her later in Topeka. The inexperienced Bo, who has fallen instantly in love with Cherie, assumes that their one night of love-making meant something, and has forced Cherie against her will to go with him to Montana to be his wife. Cherie, who is no stranger to sexual relations, is outraged by Bo’s assumptions and asks the sheriff for protection. A fourth aspect, likely reflecting Inge’s repressed homosexuality, is how Bo’s interest in Cherie will affect his friendship with Virgil. Our interest is in how these parallel relationships play off each other and are finally resolved, how each of the characters is changed by the experiences of this one night.
Inge makes the technical challenge look easy of portraying several mutating conversations all occurring within the same room. The play’s deceptive simplicity and its gradually evolution towards a happy ending masks its concern with a collection of fundamentally lonely people whose lives each come close to tragedy.
Anyone undertaking the role of Cherie has to contend with the shadow of Marilyn Monroe’s performance in Josh Logan’s famous 1957 film version. An actress has to make the role her own. Nicole Underhay tries to do this but the results are not very interesting. While she conveys Cherie’s changes from emotion to emotion quite well, what we don’t see is a rich interplay of conflicting emotions. Cherie’s attraction and repulsion with regard to Bo are closely connected. Underhay shows us one or the other but not their complex mingling.
Martin Happer, on the other hand, is excellent as Bo. Bo is the most dated character in the play--a tough, 21-year-old cowboy who is naïve, conventional and a sexual innocent. Happer makes Bo believable by showing that he is socially awkward in general, not just around women but in any kind of group. The brittleness of his bravado makes his innocence shine through.
Norman Browning steals the show as the lecherous Dr. Lyman. It is a depiction, both hilarious and sad, of a man who can’t stop himself from going through his old routine of seduction even though he is aware how tired it has become and despises himself for engaging in it. He gets progressively drunker, more maudlin, more desperate, more absurd both to himself and others until he finally passes out. The scene in which he plays Romeo to Elma’s Juliet is the hysterically funny highlight of the show even though it ends in Lyman’s collapse into tears.
As Elma, Diana Donnelly is very good at showing how an intelligent high school girl could be taken in by the superficial show of scholarship and worldliness that Lyman uses as bait. He may indeed be the smartest person she as ever met in her circumscribed life in small town Kansas, but she is naïve in equating knowledge with virtue. It is too bad that Donnelly doesn’t show us some glimmerings of doubt about Lyman and downright odd that she is not devastated or at least shaken when his true nature is revealed.
Mary Haney is wonderful as Grace, a no-nonsense woman who knows she needs a man from time to time to keep her from getting “grouchy”. Guy Bannerman gives us a fine vignette of an ordinary bus driver who suddenly realizes there may be some pleasant relief to the boredom of his daily routine. Michael Ball puts in a convincing performance as stern sheriff who can beat up a young guy not out of anger but to teach him a useful lesson. As Virgil, Peter Krantz has one of those quiet roles at which he so excels. Bo constantly confides in Virgil and depends on his advice, but Krantz subtly suggests a repressed inner pain in Virgil, who knows that the more he helps Bo win over Cherie the closer he comes to losing him as a companion.
Designer Sue LePage has created a marvelously realistic diner on stage with views into the kitchen and out the front windows and door. Her outfits for Cherie capture without caricature exactly the kind of tackiness that poor white trash might consider glamorous. Jackie Maxwell sustains Inge’s mood of comedy tinged with melancholy as she efficiently guides our focus from one conversation to the next. I would have liked the conversations to flow into each other more freely rather than appear as discreet entities as they sometimes do. Maxwell’s sense of detail extends to making absolutely clear the complex question of which conversations are or are not overheard by others and if overheard exactly by whom. Andrea Lundy’s lighting is key in shifting our focus among the various sets of conversation partners.
If the Shaw’s production of “Bus Stop” is not ideal, it is still very fine. Maxwell’s insightful direction shows us the complex layers of meaning that lie beneath the seemingly uncomplicated surface of the action. The resonance from the various parallel strands of the action cause the play to linger in the mind long after the final curtain. Maxwell clearly understands Inge and I hope she will continue to explore his work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nicole Underhay and Martin Happer.
2005-08-08
Bus Stop