The Hummingbird Motel, on the edge of New Orleans, would probably earn some pretty low ratings on TripAdvisor. There are drug dealers in one room, prostitutes in others, a broken-down car in the parking lot, a wonky soda machine and busted gutters. The coffee is apparently terrible.
It’s in this unhopeful, unhygienic spot that Lisa D’Amour sets her Broadway debut, the atmospheric and aimless Airline Highway. The play debuted at Chicago’s celebrated Steppenwolf theatre last December and has checked in to Broadway, via the Manhattan Theatre Club, with much of its original cast intact.
An ensemble piece (one of Steppenwolf’s specialties), it’s about a troupe of no-hopers who live on a very thin wedge of the crescent city: “The drunks, the addicts, the ex-addicts, the hoes, the superhoes, the ex-cons, the soon to be cons, the bouncers, the strippers, the street musicians, the faggots, the poets, the activists, the dykes, the trannies, the supertrannies – whoop, whoop!” They’ve gathered to bid farewell to Miss Ruby, a former burlesque queen now expiring on the second floor. They’re sending her out of the world in style. Or as much style as three bags of tortilla chips, a sheet cake and a trashcan keg permit.
Airline Highway is a situation in search of a story; an orgy of mood and atmosphere, of tinsel and beer and the fug of herbal cigarettes. D’Amour, who balances her more conventional plays with performance-art experiment, clearly has Lanford Wilson in mind, but there’s a trace here of Williams and maybe also O’Neill, and a scent of that peculiarly American strain of self-delusion. Nearly all of these people intend to get clean, get right, get a job, get a house … but we know that they won’t.
One of them has, however: Bait Boy (Joe Tippett) – a former brawler who now goes by the yuppie name of Greg and arrives in a clean shirt with a stepdaughter and a Whole Foods sandwich platter in tow. Bait Boy has hooked a “cougar” and is living the good life, much to the mortification of Krista (Caroline Neff), his former flame, who can’t even afford a room at the Hummingbird. But let’s not underestimate Greg’s nostalgie de la boue. D’Amour doesn’t.
This is anthropology trying to disguise itself as drama and, for a while, under Joe Mantello’s relaxed direction, it’s enough. D’Amour has a passion for casual conversation, the ways that people talk over and around and through each other. And she loves a party. She even loves the mess afterward. (This play climaxes in a celebration and concludes in a hangover, just like D’Amour’s Detroit, a finalist for the Pulitzer that also debuted at the Steppenwolf.) The performances are individual and assured, with Julie White doing spectacular work as the ageing hooker Tanya and K Todd Freeman in fine form as the supertranny Sissy Na Na.
But for all the singing and dancing and shouting, the play is oddly static, the characters behave as they always have done, making the same declarations they have always made. The only one who seems to alter is Zoe (a sweet Carolyn Braver), the teenage stepdaughter, her world slightly widened by an afternoon on the wild side. She gives a class presentation on the event in which she says: “I’ve been trying to embrace the incoherence of it all. Celebrate it, actually.” Clearly that’s what D’Amour wants to do and what she wants the audience to feel. But by the time the Airline Highway sputters to its close, there’s less to cheer than there ought to be.
• At Samuel J Friedman theatre, New York. Booking until 14 June. Box office: 212-239 6200
