Bristol Riverside's 'Bustop' doesn't quite get there

Two Bus Stops dot the American cultural landscape: the flickeringly lit, windswept one William Inge placed onstage in 1955, and the bright, shiny, sheltered one Hollywood adapted for the screen in 1956. Bristol Riverside Theatre tries to split the distance between the two, but by doing so, it never quite reaches its destination.

Bus Stop, the play, reads like an even more remote, lonelier inside view of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks. A bus filled with transients gets stuck in the snow somewhere between Topeka and Kansas City. Out everyone spills, bringing their road-bound tragedies to rest for the evening in a dumpy coffee-and-sweet-rolls spot. It's a drama about the time spent between coming into this world alone and leaving it the same way, leavened by the enthusiasm of a few youths who haven't quite noticed what their elders see all around them.

And yet, this production, directed by Susan D. Atkinson, remains enamored with Marilyn Monroe's characterization of tattered showgirl Cherie and, in the same film, Don Murray's portrayal of Bo, the hotheaded cowboy who abducts her in the hope of marrying her and installing her on his Montana farm. Jessica Wagner's Cherie adopts Monroe's pouty, breathy mannerisms, painted up with bright-red lips and cheeks, and a messy platinum blonde wig. She even changes into a near-copy of one of the film's costumes. Grant Struble is a ringer for Murray, long, lean, dark-haired and handsome, but he and Wagner are both garish and cartoony, impersonators of flawed interpretations of the real thing.

There are hints of what could have been in Mark Jacoby's stoop-shouldered performance as the lecherous English professor Dr. Lyman, and in the waning joie de vivre of Barbara McCulloh's hard-edged, redheaded cafe proprietor, Grace. Nels Anderson's set, from the faded paint on the shop walls to the too-cheery pattern on the window treatments, underscores well the disconnect between the script's sadder themes and Atkinson's efforts to overshadow them with bright nostalgia.

Somehow, after all these years, Bus Stop hasn't fallen out of favor. It's unafraid to plumb the depths and enjoy the weirdness and wonder of the human condition. In that way, it's timeless - but you'd never see that if all you knew was this motley group treading the surface and looking backward.

Wendy_Rosenfield@yahoo.com

@WendyRosenfield

www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillystage/

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Bus Stop

Through Oct. 18 at Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe St., Bristol

Tickets: $37-$47

Information: 215-785-0100 or www.BRTStage.org

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