Hayes offers a mostly favorable review of Inge's play, but the critic laments that Bus Stop lacks the spark of the playwright's earlier works, notably Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba.

A vaudeville of personality, picturesque and vivid: thus might one suggest the flavor and quality of Mr. William Inge's new play. For in this bleached and seedy café, poised carelessly on a wasteland of snowbound prairies, an American Symposium is mounted; it is the nature of love with which Mr. Inge is concerned. The light of his sensibility flickers with active indolence over the theme, catching its many faces of truth; the director, Harold Clurman—with his special talent for modulation— faultlessly places each of these small private epiphanies in a seamless texture of dramatic experience. Everything is common about the raw matter of "Bus Stop" but the taste and feeling with which it has...