‘Airline Highway’ Is a Portrait of the Underclass of New Orleans
Charles IsherwoodApril 23, 2015: The motley characters in Lisa D’Amour’s ebullient “Airline Highway” are gathering for the funeral of one of their own, Miss Ruby, a former stripper who lived alongside them in a rundown New Orleans motel. Or rather lives. Strictly speaking, Miss Ruby isn’t dead but dying. She has requested the premature funeral — which turns out to be a raucous wake — so she can attend the festivities, even if it means being lugged down from her room to the parking lot on a hospital gurney. The piteous truth is this funeral party might really be held for almost any of the characters, whose lives have crashed and burned, sputtered and stalled, or become mired in confusion, disappointment, addiction. Although they may still have the breath of life in them, and a hunger for stray shards of joy that bleeds through their armor of resignation or defiance, their futures are little brighter than Miss Ruby’s. Ms. D’Amour’s dark comedy, which opened on Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in a bright-blazing production directed by Joe Mantello, draws a compassionate but unvarnished collective portrait of the underclass of New Orleans, a city where millions of tourists converge to party, little noticing that among the bottles and beads littering the streets are plenty of people who refuse to let the party end, and often pay a hard price for it. The production, from the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, here presented by Manhattan Theater Club, brims with humor and pungent life. It features a flawless cast led by the Tony winner Julie White (“The Little Dog Laughed”), whose harrowing performance handily surpasses her superb prior work in lighter comedies. Ms. D’Amour’s play has a loose, baggy structure that sometimes works against it, but this aptly reflects the aimlessness of its characters, who live day to day and would rather not think about the unhappy past or the foggy future.
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