American playwright William Inge’s “Bus Stop” – which is being performed at Actors’ Summit, a Knight Arts grantee – takes the audience through some seemingly shabby lives before it lightens up by the end of the drama.

Set in a small town in the middle of Kansas (about 25 miles from Topeka) during a raging blizzard, five travelers by bus are forced to spend the night together in a small diner. As they wait for the roads to clear, they are left with each other. It’s not always a pretty picture.

There’s Cherie (played to the hilt in a captivating performance by Llewie Nunez), who is at best a lady with a past, a saloon singer with ambition, and a woman being abducted by a cowboy, Bo Decker (played with brash gusto by Dean Coutris), who intends to take her away by force to his ranch in Montana and marry her.

Dean Coutris and Llewie Nunez in “Bus Stop.” Photo courtesy of Actors’ Summit

There’s Grace Hoyland (extremely well acted by Elizabeth Lawson), who owns and runs Grace’s Diner, where all the parties are snowed in. She hasn’t a clue where her husband is, nor does she care. Instead she is content to spend 20 minutes upstairs in her apartment with the bus drivers who regularly pass through. This night she fakes a headache to spend a longer time in bed with Carl (played energetically and lasciviously by Jim Fippin).

There’s Virgil Blessing (played in a grand low key by Bill Hoffman), another cowboy and sidekick to Bo, who never married because, he said, he prefers hanging out and living with other men. At the end, when Bo goes off with Cherie, he is, as Grace says, “left out in the cold.”

Add to the growing list Dr. Gerald Lyman (played in a wonderfully delivered range of emotion by Doug Hendel), a failed academic who can’t hold a job or a wife (he’s had several). Thing is, Lyman was caught hanging around schoolyards and was being chased out of town, only to land with these people, one of whom is a 16-year old waitress in high school, Elma Duckworth (played engagingly by Rebecca Ribley). At the end, when Elma realizes that the aged Lyman had his eyes on seducing the underage girl, she felt flattered, and slightly pleased.

Playwright Inge piled up the sexual tensions to be sure. Yet he seemed much more interested in the idea of wanting and liking attention and pairing that with the inappropriate impulses or advances of others – and seeing how the characters react.

Bo meant well, when seeing Cherie smile at him from the stage, and imagining that meant she was taken with him. His pawing of her as he whirled her in circles, hauling her off against her will, deciding without so much as asking that they would marry – none of that set well with Cherie, who at first liked the attention but really wanted more in a relationship.

Everything works out in the end, for the sheriff with the telling name of Will Masters (played with strength by Alex Nine), kept them all under emotional and physical control until all got resolved. Bo alters (much against his cowboy inclination) his behavior and is gentle and thoughtful to Cherie. The professor realizes that his failed adult relationships didn’t mean he could regress into unsavory behavior, and contemplates analysis. Carl and Grace go the friends with benefits route.

The set and the costumes are incredibly appropriate for this production. Director Ric Goodwin did an amazing job moving characters about, and giving them things to do to keep them in character while attention shifted elsewhere on the stage. “Bus Stop” is being performed at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday through March 9 at Greystone Hall, 103 High St., Akron; 330-374-7568; www.actorssummit.org. Tickets are $33 for adults, $28 for seniors over 65; and $10 for all full time students under 30.