On & Off Broadway

'Airline Highway'

Reviewed by Elyse Trevers

Posted

Families come in all shapes and forms. They’re the people who know you and care about you in spite of everything. In Airline Highway, a play imported from Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, a group of people living on the fringes of society form a family. Several of them live in the rundown Hummingbird Motel on Airline Highway in New Orleans. They are drug users and prostitutes, transvestites and workers in dead-end jobs. Yet they are there for one another.

They are planning a funeral for Miss Ruby, the elderly lady who owned the club where many of them once worked. However, Miss Ruby (Judith Roberts) is still alive and very much lucid though not ambulatory. In fact, she must be carried downstairs to enjoy her wake. She just wants her funeral held while she is alive to enjoy it. She’s the mother figure who has supported and cheered them on so her sendoff must be grand.

Tanya (Julie White), a middle-aged prostitute, takes charge, giving everyone assignments for the party. Yet despite their aimlessness, many of the denizens have vitality and charm. White gives her usual excellent performance as the warm and fragile Tanya. K. Todd Freeman plays a transvestite, Sissy Na Na, who seems to be the voice of reason and rationality despite the glitter and feathers. Other characters, like young Zoe (Carolyn Braver), represent the futility of their lives. Ironically Bait Boy (Joe Tippett), who has managed to escape, returns for the funeral, yet by the end, seems to have been drawn back.

The play may sound depressing and hopeless, yet under the capable direction of Joe Mantello and the skillful writing of Lisa D’Amour, the residents of Airline Highway are often upbeat and boisterous, funny and lively. Maybe some of their ‘high’ is chemically fueled, but the audience is invited to come along for the ride down the highway.