Airline Highway: A Play

by Lisa D'Amour

Overview

Airline Highway is a rollicking play that, with great insight, humor, and subtlety, examines a tight knit community of "outsiders" over the course of a single, legendary day. The Hummingbird Hotel is the figurative or literal home for a group of strippers, French Quarter service workers, hustlers, and poets who are bound together by their bad luck, bad decisions, and complete lack of pretense. Presiding over them is Miss Ruby, a beloved former burlesque performer who has requested a funeral before she dies. As the people whose lives she has touched gather to celebrate her, they must face themselves, each other, and the consequences of the choices they have made. Airline Highway shows us the tenuous hold that community, authenticity, and real-time ritual have on a rapidly gentrifying New Orleans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810132887
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

LISA D’AMOUR is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist whose work has been produced on Broadway, in regional theaters including Steppenwolf, Playwrights Horizons, and Woolly Mammoth, and, with her company PearlDamour, in many unconventional locations. Her play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Editorial Reviews

"Ms. D’Amour’s dark comedy draws a compassionate but unvarnished collective portrait of the underclass of New Orleans, a city where millions of tourists converge to party, little noticing that among the bottles and beads littering the streets are plenty of people who refuse to let the party end, and often pay a hard price for it."—Charles Isherwood, New York Times

 

"Another excellent piece of writing from [a] compelling new voice in American theater."—Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

"D’Amour’s deep and decidedly soulful work takes us convincingly into the world of the ‘real’ New Orleans. These are the strippers, hookers, and party-animal bartenders who have made an everyday pursuit of the search for what Miss Ruby, their dying substitute mother, calls ‘ecstatic experience.’"—Variety

 

From the Publisher