Make A Stop At This Bus Stop
by Karen Tortora-Lee on March 25, 2009
William Inge’s classic Bus Stop was written in the mid-fifties and at The Gallery Players’ production everything right down to set designer Edward Morris’ bread box and costume designer Meredith Neal’s use of horn-rimmed glasses reflect that awww-shucks time period. But even if director Heather Siobhan Curran had decided to take a little creative license and move the whole thing up to 2009, the plot wouldn’t allow it … for one very simple reason. In the middle of the night when a bus must pull into a roadside diner due to bad weather, instead of people sitting off to the side, watching Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on hulu.com, checking their emailing from their Android, updating their FaceBook profiles, Twittering about how boring it is to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, or even just (yawn) listening to their iPod, they actually talk to each other. Sooooooo last century.
The last time I had all the time in the world to tell my life story in a no-distractions-allowed environment was when I was on a jury back in 1992; after 3 weeks I knew all about how Con Edison worked, the entire contents of a bachelor’s refrigerator, heard Vietnam War stories from a vet, and discussed the Torah with a rabbinical student. These were fascinating stories; but they came out slowly and over the course of weeks. The characters of Bus Stop just have the one night …
