Down-and-out dreamers who never realize their dreams have been theatrical tropes centuries before Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Playwright Lisa D’Amour embraces this theme, bats it around, then takes it nowhere. Her Airline Highway (2014), realized with a refreshing insouciance from Dirt Dogs Theatre Co., leaves one baffled and unfulfilled.
At the seedy Hummingbird Motel on the outskirts of New Orleans, the residents have hit bottom. They dream of better lives, utterly believe their dreams, but are stuck in a rut. They are incapable of moving on. They don’t blame “the man,” or society, or even their bad choices, they just accept their fate. This is where they’ve landed, and this is where they’re staying. So much for empathy, conflict – or drama.
The motel is their family, their community, their safe space. They help each other, bitch at each other, talk over each other, then stay exactly where they were when we first meet them. D’Amour delineates her characters with quirky personal sketches (for a few of them) and then uses a very clunky exposition when young Zoe arrives to chronicle this “subculture” for her high school project. This is easy, sloppy writing; beneath D’Amour, whose previous drama was the Pulitzer-finalist Detroit, which dealt much more subtly with class and the fraying of the American Dream.
Here, every character is a stereotype, an easy mark. Tanya (Elizabeth Marshall Black) is an over-the-hill prostitute; Krista (Ashlyn Evans) is a stripper who’s been kicked out of the motel for back rent; Sissy Na Na (Todd Thigpen) is a drag queen with tart tongue; Wayne (Brad Goertz) is the hotel manager who dreams of buying the property across the road to build a nightclub and carries a torch for Tanya; Francis (John Patterson) is an unpublished poet who can’t hold a job; Terry (David Osbie Shepard) is the motel handyman who can’t fix anything; and Miss Ruby (Deborah Hope) is the earth-mother matriarch whose “living funeral” is the reason for the parking lot party. The surprise guest is Bait Boy (Kyle Clark) with teen stepdaughter Zoe (Morgan Taylor Hughs). He got out from under the drugs, the ennui, the no-exit life, found a sugar mamma in Atlanta, but now, under the spell of old flame Krista, falls immediately into his randy old habits.
The actors do their utmost to imbue their misfit characters with internal life under the sharp direction of Malinda L. Beckham and Curtis Barber, but author D’Amour lets them down at every opportunity. She slathers her play with annoying overlapping dialogue to convey everyday conversation, but this technique muddies salient plot points and makes a hash out of the play’s rhythm. This jumble isn’t natural. It sounds stagy and artificial.
And what is D’Amour preaching? Be a deadbeat, but as long as you have a family you’re okay? Who cares if you never move on or grow up, as long as you’re part of a loving community, isn’t that everything? “Celebrate, not explain,” espouses Miss Ruby when she’s coherent during her final monologue. (And Hope is quite magical and seductive.) “Be authentic…revel in the present, the truth, the flow.” Oh, brother. What an enabler! This is the worst advice these sad sacks need. They will never leave the Hummingbird Motel. Why should they, they’ve got friends who are just like them.
Mark A. Lewis delivers a seedy split-level motel set with dusty detail: a pile of tires, worn-out lawn chairs, a broken Coke machine, discarded hub caps, windows covered with newspaper or aluminum foil. Beckham’s costumes are a riot of third-hand Salvation Army discards, while Ash Parra’s lighting is appropriately down and dirty.
Everyone grumbles, shouts, seduces in D’Amour’s drama, but no one changes. They dance and sing, support each other, but go nowhere. They end up exactly where they started. Outcasts spinning wheels is not drama.
Airline Highway continues through June 6 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Monday, June 1; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; and 2 p.m Sundays at Dirt Dogs at MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit dirtdogstheatre.org. $35.
