It's primarily a comedy whose genuine sweetness never long disguises the bleak nature of the lives it's recording. That, however, is to freight the text with meanings that should creep out in their own good time. "Bus Stop" can be accurately described as a fugue whose themes are the various aspects of love. Will, the local sheriff, and Virgil are the unsurprised spectators to the mayhem.
Lyman romances Elma, the literature-loving, teen-age waitress, while Grace, the owner of the diner, finds time to accommodate Carl, the macho bus driver for whom she has long had an itch. In the course of this fraught, turbulent night, Bo courts Cherie like a bull going after a blond mouse, Dr.
It was also the basis of a 1960's television drama series for which Inge himself was a script consultant. His biggest hit: "Bus Stop," first seen as the memorable Broadway production, directed by Harold Clurman and starring Kim Stanley, then as the considerably rewritten film vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, directed by Josh Logan. He continued to work until his suicide in 1973, though nothing he wrote had the impact of those plays. In seven years he turned out the four plays that are his legacy: "Come Back, Little Sheba," 1950 "Picnic," 1953 "Bus Stop," 1955, and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," 1957. He saw them mostly in economically depressed but sexually charged circumstances, which proved extremely popular with both the critics and the public. Inge dramatized the melancholy, the humor and the unconscious gallantry of commonplace characters. Yet by his attention to the language and behavior of inarticulate, rural Americans, he created a small body of highly theatrical stage literature, works that are rivaled only by those of the far more rigorous Horton Foote.
He was a deceptively prosy sort of writer. They were of the same generation, but Inge was not of the stature of the other two, being neither a great poet of the theater nor a grandly dramatic moralist. DURING the height of his career in the 1950's, the playwright William Inge was sometimes placed in the pantheon of post-World War II giants with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.