Bus Stop became one of Marilyn Monroe's most endearing film showcases after a successful Broadway run that won four Tony Award nominations and enhanced the careers of its participants, especially director Harold Clurman and actresses Kim Stanley and Elaine Stritch. For decades the play has been a staple of regional, university and community theaters. During the 1961-62 television season, Inge himself was script supervisor of the hour-long ABC series Bus Stop, based on the play and starring Marilyn Maxwell as Grace, the owner of a bus station and diner located this time in Colorado. The series ran for 25 episodes; the sixth, "Cherie," was an abbreviated version of the original play, with Tuesday Weld, Gary Lockwood and Joseph Cotten in leading roles.

In August 1982 a production at the Claremont Theater in California was telecast on HBO, with Margot Kidder and Tim Matheson in the leads. The play was revived briefly on Broadway in 1996 with Mary-Louise Parker and Billy Crudup as the stars. Major regional revivals have included one at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theater Festival in the summer of 2005, and another at Boston's Huntington Theatre in the fall of 2010. Reviewing the former production in The New York Times, critic Ben Brantley wrote that, under the play's "surface glow of Eisenhower-era optimism, it also pulses with the psychosexual undercurrents in which the Freud-conscious Inge specialized." During the period 2010-2011 there were three productions in Great Britain including a critically praised version directed by James Dacre at the New Vic and Stephen Joseph Theatres. The Guardian described this production as "beguiling...[a] forlorn slice of Americana which mediates on the distance between towns and the distances between people, like an Edward Hopper painting with dialogue."

By Roger Fristoe