Theatre in Review: Airline Highway (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Ken Marks, Scott Jaeck. Photo: Joan Marcus

In Airline Highway, playwright Lisa D'Amour invents an entire tribe of losers, New Orleans-style, and scatters them about the stage like so many colorful Mardi Gras beads. They include Sissy Na Na, a black drag queen with plenty of sass; Francis, a self-styled poet who gets by doing odd jobs; Krista, a stripper with plenty of heartbreak in her past; and Tanya, an aging prostitute with a pill problem. They all congregate at the Hummingbird Motel, a two-story dump outside the city, which is overseen by Wayne, the scion of a downwardly mobile New Orleans family, who ended up at the Hummingbird when a career in air conditioner repair proved too challenging. They are as seedy a collection of characters as you will find on a Broadway stage at the moment.

As the lights come up, they are preparing a funeral for Miss Ruby, a former strip club owner who is quietly dying in a room on the second floor. The intention is to give Miss Ruby her send-off before she goes, so she can see how well-loved she is -- that is, if she isn't too delirious from the combination of illness and medication. Given the location, this is to be a jazz funeral, with a full bar, loud music, and outrageous costumes; mourning will not be tolerated.

In a sense, Airline Highway is a kind of jazz funeral for New Orleans itself; the play takes place this year, but the city is still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, and these marginal characters have been pushed closer and closer to the edge. The Hummingbird is falling apart, and the gutter that breaks loose in the middle of the party is only the tip of the iceberg; across the street a Costco is going up, and nearby someone is building a spa. Clearly, sin isn't as remunerative as it used to be. Ladies like Tanya and Krista have little to show for their shady lines of work, nor does Miss Ruby, after years of running her own business. The characters of Airline Highway may constitute so much human wreckage, but they were once part of the fabric of a city that is in danger of losing its pleasure-seeking soul.

The main action of Airline Highway involves the return, for Miss Ruby's funeral, of Bait Boy, who worked in a club, running karaoke night and introducing the ladies, and who was Krista's boyfriend. Their relationship was a bruising collection of highs and lows until he ran off to Atlanta with an older businesswoman, for whom he now sells magazine advertising. He attends the funeral with Zoe, his lover's adolescent daughter, who wants to study the crowd at the Hummingbird as a "subculture" for her sociology project. This is the weakest part of Airline Highway; performing her interviews, Zoe seems like a device to cue the wrenching monologues that follow. It's hard to believe that Zoe's mother, whom we are told is a pretty controlling sort, would allow Bait Boy to visit his old haunts with her daughter in tow.

Nevertheless, most of the time Airline Highway, a Steppenwolf production, is a vivid, funny, teeming canvas depicting the underbelly of the city's tourist economy. The play seems to have been conceived along the lines of two Lanford Wilson plays, The Hot L Baltimore and Balm in Gilead, both of which collect gangs of lower-depths types and allow them to gorgeously run off at the mouth; Balm in Gilead provided Steppenwolf with an early breakout success. D'Amour's characters are, by and large, unapologetic about their bad decisions and scruffy lives; at times, they are so feisty and so insistent that they constitute a kind of family that the play appears to be veering into sentimentality. But so vividly realized are they in Joe Mantello's vibrant production, that you are likely to be more than happy to spend a couple of hours in their company.

Steppenwolf is, of course, known for its fine ensemble work and it does not disappoint here. K. Todd Freeman's Sissy Na Na is the group's tower of strength, dispensing medication to Miss Ruby and hard truths to everyone else; he makes the most of a monologue in which he recalls his father's disgusted reaction to having an effeminate son. As Tanya, Julie White organizes the party with aplomb, bossing everyone on stage while fretting that one of the three children she gave away is trying to track her down. At times, she holds the entire crowd together by sheer force of personality, but when she craves a pill, she comes unglued most convincingly. White takes a potentially clichéd role -- the whore with a heart of gold -- and gives her an authentic soul. There are also fine contributions from Scott Jaeck as the feckless Wayne; Ken Marks as Francis, who doesn't mind making a pass at the underage Zoe; Caroline Neff, whose Krista pathetically yearns after her lost lover, trumping up a false career as a paralegal to impress him; Tim Edward Rhoze as Terry, the motel's unhandyman; and Joe Tippett as Bait Boy, whose return to the Hummingbird is marked by mixed motives and one of which involves reliving his tumultuous affair with Krista. Carolyn Braver is genuinely touching as Zoe, who does her best to keep up with this crowd. (She has also to deal with a strange coda scene in which Zoe presents her school report, which contains startlingly inappropriate information about her family. Judith Roberts makes a fine eleventh-hour appearance as Miss Ruby, the group's mother confessor, and, quite possibly, a representative of God, who, half-delirious, urges them to face and forgive themselves.

Scott Pask's stunning two-level set depicts the parking lot of the Hummingbird -- which has only one car, resting on blocks. It's an epic picture of decay, complete with enormous sign, office windows framed in tacky rope light, another sign advertising prices of $34.99 a night and low weekly rates, and a lone shopping cart from God-knows-where. Japhy Weideman's lighting plausibly guides us through several time-of-day looks, including early morning, full daytime, and the dark of night. David Zinn's costumes reflect each character's highly personal style (or lack thereof); the designer really goes to town when the party gets going, when out come the rainbow tutus and multicolored synthetic wigs. Fitz Patton's sound design includes some jazz and rock selections along with ambient traffic sounds.

With this play and the earlier Detroit, D'Amour would appear to be the poet of urban decline. That the plays are so wildly different -- Detroit is a compact, almost Pinterian piece of work, miles apart from the gabby, extravagantly messed up citizens of Airline Highway -- shows that she has the ability to approach her themes from many different angles. That bodes well for a career that shows additional promise with each new work. -- David Barbour