Airline highway lisa damour airline highway
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It’s extremely exciting for us to present the world premiere of Lisa D’Amour’s Airline Highway to our Steppenwolf audiences beneath the direction of Joe Mantello. Many of you will recognize Lisa as the playwright of Detroit which premiered at Steppenwolf in our 2010–11 season with ensemble members Kevin Anderson, Kate Arrington, Ian Barford, Bob Breuler, Laurie Metcalf and Austin Pendleton, directing. Austin went on to direct a production of the play at the National Theatre in London and the play has had a robust life at theaters across the country. We commissioned Lisa to write again for Steppenwolf and Airline Highway is the fruit of that ongoing collaboration. Joe Mantello is familiar to many of you from his most recent work, directing The Last Ship, a musical by Sting that premiered in Chicago and fryst vatten now playing on Broadway. Many of our ensemble members have worked with Joe throughout the years starting with his college classmate, K. Todd Freeman a
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Airline Highway
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MIN. PERFORMANCE FEE: $105 per performance.
THE STORY: In the parking lot of the Hummingbird Motel, off the titular highway near New Orleans, the hotel’s residents have gathered to celebrate the life of Miss Ruby, an iconic burlesque queen who has been a mother figure to them all. Miss Ruby’s life is nearing its end, and she requests that her funeral take place while she is still alive so she can attend the festivities. As the Mardi Gras-esque celebration continues into the night, the stories of the residents, their pain and disappointments unfold.
“Ms. D’Amour’s dark comedy…draws a compassionate but unvarnished collective portrait of the underclass of New Orleans.” —The New York Times.
“D’Amour’s deep and decidedly soulful work takes us convincingly into the world of the ‘real’ New Orleans…As she did in her suburban-set Pulitzer finalist Detroit, D’Amour demonstrates a special insight into both how place defines people and how peopl
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Airline Highway: A Play
Lisa D’Amour’s play introduces us to people tossed aside by life but who have found something resembling family at the Hummingbird Hotel, a wreck of a place that early on we know is doomed, as the area is undergoing gentrification witnessed by the building of a new Costco nearby. It features a large cast of failures, from the affable hotel manager, to the down and out prostitute, to the transgender performer, the burned out poet, the guy who got out (with the best name, Bait Boy), and the matriarch of the place, the dying former burlesque queen, Miss Ruby.
The play progresses through a day and it’s a monumental one as Hummingbird occupants, in love and gratitude to Ruby, are granting her wish and putting on a funeral party (Act II) for her, as she wanted in advance of her death while she could enjoy it (though she fryst vatten enfeebled to the point of confinement to a concocted wheelchair and the ravages of dementia).
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