The Transport Group's artistic director Jack Cummings III has a flair for giving a fresh and distinctly modern twist to works by distinguished twentieth century writers.

Cummings' first venture, a revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, was notable for its surprisingly non-gimicky reverse casting of two older actors as Emily and George. Bus Stop is set in a diner in rural Kansas, about 25 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri during a snowstorm from which bus passengers must take shelter. Other productions might well have proved too dated for modern audiences if less lovingly and astutely staged. Requiem for William which fused seven of William Inge's one act plays into a wonderful music-flavored collage was well received by TG's predominantly young core audience the same was true for Tad Mosel's All the Way Home about a family facing a sudden death during the summer of 1915. While the Inge and Mosel plays featured large and excellent casts, that didn't mean box-office busting actors. (See links to reviews of the above at the end of this review). Now Cummings has taken another step towards restoring William Inge to his rightful place alongside Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, by mounting a fine revival of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Unlike the little known one-acts of Requiem for William, this was the last of Inge's four Broadway hits ( Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, Bus Stop), all of which were made into films.Īctually Dark.

was reworked from Further Off From Heaven, the very first play Inge wrote in 1945. Dramas are typically called plays, and their creators are known as playwrights or dramatists. Dramas can be performed on stage, on film, or the radio. After three Broadway successes, Inge felt confident of his writing and settled down to write a fourth play based on his first one, Farther Off From Heaven. In literature, a drama is the portrayal of fictional or non-fictional events through the performance of written dialog (either prose or poetry). Har- old Clurman, the director, handled the plays rural types well, and the O audiences received the play adoringly. That early version had a very brief life in a Dallas theater but was well enough received to encourage Inge to keep writing and by the time it was rewritten and re-titled Inge was a hot enough playwright to attract a director like Elia Kazan and big name actors like Pat Hingle and Teresa Wright to play Ralph and Cora Floyd and Eileen Heckart to play her blowsy, outspoken older sister Lottie. Bus Stop became the third Broadway venture for Inge in 1955.

(The cast makes the much less subtle film worth seeing-Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire and Eve Arden, also Shirley Knight as young Reenie Flood and Angela Lansbury as Mavis Pruitt who's mentioned but never seen in the play).

Bus stop william inge script pdf