New Play in Manhattan

Bus Stop (by William Inge) is the season's and possibly the author's best play. In this night-lighted picture of snow-stalled, long-distance-bus passengers huddling in a small-town eatery, the author of Picnic sounds no great depths and stirs no new currents, and he clutches sentiment to the same degree that he shrugs off story. But at its own level, Bus Stop is fresh and engaging. In catching the drift, and once or twice shifting the direction of his characters' lives, Inge has revealed the surface and something of the underside of all anonymous humanity. And by writing with pervasive, even explosive humor--by showing that the way to man's heart can be through his funny bone--Inge has not just brightened, he has also enlarged his picture.

Bus Stop chiefly chronicles a raw, rambunctious young cowboy's courtship--which is virtually a kidnaping--of a soiled young Kansas City nightclub singer. Very slowly the clodhopper (Albert Salmi) discovers that an ounce of tenderness is worth a pound of bluster, while the audience simultaneously discovers that it is the bluster of a sexual tenderfoot. And the girl discovers that, though courted as though she were a punching bag, she is for once being thought of as though she were a lady.

Along with its taming of an oaf, Bus Stop chronicles the far more offhand and slightly more underhand amour of the proprietress and the bus driver (Elaine Stritch and Patrick McVey), records the spoutings, slitherings and slumbers of a drunken professor (Anthony Ross). There is also the wide-eyed high-school girl who finds the professor wonderful, there is an unrambunctious cowboy with a guitar, and there is a local sheriff who perhaps stands for law and order in the world as well as on Main Street. In a beautifully paced and harmonized production, every part is well played, and Kim Stanley plays the nightclub singer superbly.

There is far more health and humor to Bus Stop than to Playwright Inge's Picnic, but it too treats largely, at bottom, of lonely lives. If Inge's bus is a convenient stage device, it is yet a striking symbol for his whole lost, seeking, itinerant world. The peripheral figure remains the central one in Inge's gallery. But in Bus Stop there are integrated figures also; the shadows are interlaced with sunlight, the naturalistic brooder is absorbed into the humorist. The difference between the two plays is also partly one of production. Where Picnic so stressed theatrical values as to ossify human ones, Bus Stop, under Harold Clurman's understanding direction, seamlessly blends the two. Despite deeper entanglements, Picnic was all surfaced glare; Bus Stop, for all its outward humors, catches an inner glow.

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