Maricopa troupe to stage ‘Bus Stop’

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William Inge’s American play “Bus Stop” forces an odd assortment of cross-country passengers into a small diner in the middle of a snowstorm. In the course of just a few hours lives are changed.

Maricopa Community Theatre will present four performances Jan. 29-31. Thursday is a preview performance at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8.

Regular performances are Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. General admission is $12. All performances are at the Performing Arts Center at Maricopa High School.

Described as “an Edward Hopper painting with dialogue,” “Bus Stop” mixes four bus passengers and their driver with local denizens of a small-town café in the wee hours. Tensions quickly arise from personality conflicts and pseudo-romantic endeavors.

Jerry Allen plays the male lead, Bo Decker, a loud and pushy young cowboy who is not everything he makes himself out to be.

“This part is the complete polar opposite of who I am,” Allen said. “Bo Decker is definitely pompous. When he’s in the room, you definitely know he’s there.”

Allen has become accustomed to such brash parts, having played Conrad in “Bye-Bye Birdie” and Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

In the course of the plot of “Bus Stop,” he gets to dig under the layers of Bo Decker to find the real vulnerability. Bo fancies himself husband material for would-be nightclub singer Cherie, played by Natalie Bell.

It is a bit of a departure for Bell, whose youthful appearance mainly has her in ingénue roles. Playing Cherie demands a different mindset, she said.

Cherie has been around the block, so to speak, and has seen too much of life to want anything to do with Bo. Bell said though Cherie may appear to be a certain type on the outside, “there is a lot more to her than that.”

The cast also includes Carl Diedrich as the bus driver Carl, who has a little something going on with diner owner Elma, played by Hailey Rean Smith. Gabriel Jenkins plays Will Masters, the local sheriff, Cindy Kennedy is the young waitress Grace, veteran actor Timothy Avent is the troubled professor Dr. Lyman and David Vargas plays old cowboy Virgil Blessing, a father figure to Bo.

Bell and Allen are long-time friends and, like the rest of the cast, have worked with director Carrie Vargas before. Allen has been acting since 2004 and, like Jenkins, was taught by Vargas in high school.

Bell has been at the craft since doing theater workshop at age 4. She started working with Vargas in 2010, continued theater in high school and at Arizona State University.

“I’ve been passionate about it my whole life,” she said.

Despite the fact “I look like I’m 12,” Bell has played wide-ranging roles from the innocent to the darkly destructive. Cherie is somewhere in between, she said.

One of the challenges she and Allen face is setting aside their almost-sibling friendship and creating romantic chemistry on stage. What is naturally uncomfortable and even awkward they have been able to use in the clumsy relationship between Cherie and Bo.

Bell said the play “is such a good look at people and relationships, growing to love someone when you actually see them.”

Casting for the play was last fall, with rehearsals starting before Christmas. During the holiday break, however, cast members where mostly on their own to memorize lines and work out the characters.

“Processing your character is so hard on your own,” Allen said.

MCT has had a theme this season of gathering disparate characters into close confines – witness “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Vargas describes “Bus Stop” as a play “about the best and worst of humanity being thrust together and how they cope with it in the course of an evening.”

The play makes one mention of a circus, and she saw that as the theme of the play.

“It’s who’s swooping into the center of the circus to be the focus at that time,” she said. “Life is kind of circus-y. You get different people, sets of volatile people in a room, and that’s how we practice.”

Sometimes a character is just outside the ring, and sometimes he’s in the spotlight. Vargas has decided to enhance that through her interpretation of the play.