Photo by Mark Frohna
Fans of William Inge seem to have a chip on their shoulder about the playwright’s place in the American canon. I’m not sure the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s version of Bus Stop will show that Inge deserves a place next to Miller, O’Neill and Williams, but this beautifully rendered production certainly shows that Inge isn’t simply a purveyor of Heartland hokum.
It’s certainly easy to gloss him that way. Bus Stop assembles a gaggle of American archetypes, stranded in a snowstorm in a Kansas diner. There’s the cocky young cowboy and his wise and weathered companion (Ethan Hall). The country gal who dreams of a show-biz escape from her past (Anne Walaszek). The cynical mol who keeps the coffee cups full (Jacque Troy–no Flo, she). And the Shakespeare-spouting professor who is charmed by the local color (Jamie Cheatham). It’s a familiar formula—from The Tempest to The Time of Your Life to Gilligan’s Island.
Inge knows that we connect with these figures—that’s why they’re archetypes. But he doesn’t stop with a superficial connection. Once he has you hooked, he fills in the details—surprising and sometimes dark—and expands your field of vision about the characters and the world they inhabit.
Here, the discoveries are about love, and Bus Stop creates a fugue of evolving romances that intertwine and sometimes resolve on that snowy March night. Inge makes room for sunny sentiment, and also for bleak turns. The final moments of the play are quietly shattering, and they make you revisit what you’ve seen from a new perspective.
Working with students and faculty from UW-Parkside, MCT brings that requisite complexity to a script that would easily be over-sentimentalized. The cast is uniformly thoughtful, and the undergraduate students in the lead roles are first rate (Hall, Walaszek and Brenna Kempf as the wide-eyed waitress who thinks Shakespeare is neat). Director Lisa Kornetsky is adept at orchestrating the relationships—not an easy task since the full crowd is almost always onstage—and she helps the cast capture the flaws in the characters as well as Inge’s faith in them.
It’s not easy to describe Jerome Kitzke and Kathleen Masterson’s Buffalo Nation (bison bison), which Present Music commissioned and premiered this weekend. Multi-media oratorio? Theatrical tone-poem? Musical editorial? They all would apply. But here the genre-pushing and bending seems more like a symptom of indecision rather than a conscious attempt to expand music-theatre boundaries. Sometimes, more is less.
Musically, there are some beautiful moments. One of the piece’s themes played on banjo (Eric Segnitz) and trumpet (Don Sipe), a timbre that evokes both the spaciousness of the frontier and the traditions of its white settlers. Baritone Kurt Ollmann singing the meditative “Death Song,” which achieves its power with short bursts of language and melody separated by chilling silence. And the “sound effects choir,” lead by Bonnie Scholz, created some haunting textures.
But these musical highlights were overwhelmed by the cover-all-angles approach that Kitzke and Masterson take toward their subject. Sure there is poetry in Buffalo Nation, but there is advocacy journalism as well, and some of it is tedious. There is nothing wrong with using actors to add some language and dramatic elements here. But have them recreate an oral-history interview with a family who live in the midst of the rebounding bison population? Or describe in detail a new government program aimed at bison preservation? It’s the kind of information that might be inspiring to an artist, but here it’s prosaic and preachy, the stuff of preaching-to-the-choir documentary.
