Airline Highway NYC Reviews and Tickets

"A bright-blazing production...brims with humor and pungent life. It features a flawless cast...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...the teeming energy that floods the stage helps roll past the more heavy-treading passages."
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"Although the characters are familiar in many ways, director Joe Mantello and his accomplished cast breathe spirit into most of them, and the big, boozy party scene has jazzy vigor...'Airline Highway’s' multiple plot threads are pulled out (or forgotten) in a rushed, unsatisfying denouement that resorts to summarizing its message to the audience in the form of a (literal) high-school class presentation. Like the cinder-block–mounted car the play has color and beat-up charm, but doesn’t go anywhere."
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"A beautiful and mesmerizing kaleidoscope of a play by Lisa D’Amour...In its loving attention to squalid detail, it does a novel’s worth of work."
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"Despite being given a dynamic production with a highly capable cast, this rambling character-driven piece lacks drive and clarity of purpose. While it's a vividly populated canvas, the playwright doesn't do anything much of interest with it...Many in the audience will have lost patience long before then with this disappointing play."
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"D’Amour’s writing can be incredibly on-the-nose. Her affection and lack of judgment for the seedy characters within is truly felt. Their aimlessness might translate literally to some audiences while the refreshing lack of melodrama might entice others...Director Joe Mantello has wisely retained most of his first-rate Steppenwolf cast. They make 'Airline Highway' more than worth a one-night stay."
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"Like a lot of all-night parties, this one doesn’t stand up to the light. The scribe has installed a well-observed group of misfits and losers in the Hummingbird Motel, a haven for social outcasts. But aside from throwing her makeshift family that state-of-the-art shindig, she doesn’t give them much to do — or let them do anything for themselves...'Airline Highway' comes from a long tradition of waiting-room plays, which see a lot of misery but not much action."
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"It’s a wholly derivative piece of work that has been knocked together from refurbished spare theatrical parts...For all its shameless familiarity, the first act of 'Airline Highway' is perfectly watchable, even entertaining...Not so the second act."
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"D’Amour, while clearly sympathetic to her characters, conjures a world too neatly balanced, too eccentric, too oddly wholesome. They’re types, not people. 'Airline Highway' never reaches the status of powerful Katrina post-mortem it seems to be striving for."
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