Audio By Carbonatix
Bus Stop. A snowstorm has closed the road ahead, and a bus is
stranded outside a diner, where worldly-wise owner Grace supervises her
high-school-aged waitress, Elma. Among those requiring doughnuts and
coffee or bacon and eggs are driver Carl, who is Grace’s occasional
lover, and disgraced philosophy professor Gerald Lyman. The primary
drama, however, is provided by cowboy Bo Decker and Cherie, who calls
herself a chanteuse. A lad with no experience of women, Bo has forced
Cherie onto the bus — despite the remonstrations of his best
friend, Virgil — and now plans to take her to his cattle ranch in
Montana. The local sheriff, Will, is at the diner, and Cherie turns to
him for help. William Inge’s Bus Stop was written in 1955, and
the play shows its age — though in some ways, it also tests the
received wisdom of its time. The evening is an extended conversation on
love, love in several manifestations. In addition to the sparring of Bo
and Cherie, there’s Grace’s taste for unencumbered sex and single
living, the professor’s interest in young girls, and Elma’s crush on
the professor — a crush sparked by her love of learning and his
store of knowledge. The performances are good, but not quite good
enough to ransom the script’s weaknesses and deepen its strengths.
Still, you can’t help being happy when Bo and Cherie finally walk into
each other’s arms. Presented by Paragon Theatre through June 6,
Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington Street, 303-300-2210, www.paragontheatre.org. Reviewed
May 14.
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman
evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience
participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers
Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at
some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were
transfixed by the similarities and differences they found in them, as
well as the insights they gained into their own psyches and the
travails of puberty. This theater piece was developed from that
material — but not all of that material. “I purposely don’t read
every diary entry in the show, because it turns out I was kind of mean,
and I don’t want to be mean,” Klein told an interviewer. But mean is
funny, and when you cut it out entirely, what do you have to joke
about? Girly pink bedrooms, purses, bras, skinny models in glossy
magazines. Every time they tell a story with the tiniest bite to it,
Gehring and Klein — both talented and appealing stage performers
— move instantly to reassure us that they don’t mean it. At one
point Klein relates an interesting tale about how she came to possess
the badly taxidermied body of an electrocuted squirrel as a child; the
minute she’s completed this funny, freaky moment in an otherwise highly
predictable evening, she gives a pouty, don’t-get-me-wrong grin and
sweetly caresses the squirrel’s head. There’s enough good material here
for a tight, funny, one-hour-long show, but this one stretches on and
on, as if Klein and Gehring had been determined to throw every single
joke and piece of shtick that occurred to them in the script. Presented
by Denver Center Attractions through June, Garner Galleria Theatre in
the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed
September 18.
