TT: At, not with

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report from Boston on the Huntington Theatre Company’s new revival of William Inge’s Bus Stop, about which I had sharply mixed feelings. Here’s an excerpt.
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Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company has revived “Bus Stop” in a production staged by Nicholas Martin, whose 2007 Huntington revival of Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter” moved to Broadway last season. I doubt that his “Bus Stop” will meet with the same good fortune, not because it doesn’t work on its own terms but because Mr. Martin’s staging, though undeniably effective, is false to the play’s nature. Inge called “Bus Stop” a comedy, and it contains more than enough funny moments to justify the label. But “Bus Stop” is a serious comedy, one in which pathos is never far from the surface, and Mr. Martin has chosen to direct the first two acts for laughter instead of truth. The result is a production that too often encourages the audience to laugh at the characters instead of with them, which diminishes both the characters and the play.
If you’ve never seen “Bus Stop,” it’s a “Grand Hotel”-like tale of a group of travelers who get caught in a blizzard and are forced to spend the night holed up in a small-town diner somewhere in Kansas. As they interact with three of the town’s residents and with one another, we gradually get to know the characters, all of whom are looking for love. One of them, Bo (Noah Bean), is a sexually inexperienced young cowboy who has fallen for Cherie (Nicole Rodenburg), a shopworn nightclub singer, and is trying to persuade her to come home to Montana with him. Also on hand are Virgil (Stephen Lee Anderson), Bo’s longtime sidekick; Grace (Karen MacDonald), the hard-bitten owner of the diner, who longs to lure the bus driver (Will LeBow) into the sack; Elma (Ronete Levenson), a bright but innocent teenager who waits tables for Grace and catches the eye of Dr. Lyman (Henry Stram), a Shakespeare-spouting drunk with an ugly penchant for chasing underage girls; and Will (Adam LeFevre), the town sheriff, a quiet gent who is tougher than he looks.
We are, in short, deep in the heart of Cliché Country–except that Inge writes about his eight stock-company characters with a compassionate and comprehending sympathy that makes each one seem as real as your next-door neighbor. This is where Mr. Martin goes wrong, for he has all too clearly encouraged the key members of the cast to overplay their parts, opting for broad caricature instead of laconic understatement (except in the last act, where the actors finally get in tune with the play and bring it to a satisfying close). It’s as though he doesn’t trust the audience to know when to be amused….
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Read the whole thing here.