Live Arts opens its season with Airline Highway, and the launch of a new under-25 ticket initiative, beginning on October 3. Photo: Will Kerner.
The new season at Live Arts begins with an ending. Sort of.
Airline Highway opens at a funeral for Miss Ruby, a former burlesque performer and club owner who hasn’t died yet. That doesn’t stop a colorful cast of drag queens, poets, strippers, and hustlers from celebrating her with a living funeral in the 2015 play by Lisa D’Amour that balances grief, love, and humor in a rundown motel outside of New Orleans.
Director Jude Hansen, who made his Live Arts directorial debut with 2023’s one-man play Buyer & Cellar, had a significantly different experience with Airline Highway—largely due to the 17-person cast and a script he compares to an orchestral score.
Like a score with musicians playing overlapping, and sometimes but not always, harmonious parts, D’Amour’s script features multiple interactions occurring simultaneously on different parts of the stage. Even within these layered conversations, D’Amour makes judicious use of slashes, notating when characters should begin speaking over each other. The result is controlled chaos that manages, despite careful scripting, to feel improvised.
“It’s a giant puzzle that I’ve had to unravel, and then reconstruct and plan it very strictly,” Hansen says. “And then allow it to feel like it’s chaotic, because it’s a party.”
With the help of his lighting and sound designers, Hansen spotlights different parts of the stage, depending on which conversation he wants to draw audience attention to. What audience members see, however, relies, at least in part, on where they’re sitting.
Live Arts Interim Artistic Director Bree Luck, who has observed rehearsals from a variety of seats and experienced a slightly different show each time, says first impressions of the play will depend on each theatergoer’s seat location, and on their interests.
“There’s a little burlesque, there’s a little fighting, there’s a lot of love,” says Luck. “Some people are going to really connect with the fight scene, some people are really going to connect with the burlesque scene, and some are going to connect with that small moment between two characters who are really telling it straight to each other.”
In addition to the laughter and anger, Airline Highway, at its core, is about the grief of knowing community leader Miss Ruby is dying. That has been particularly impactful for Hansen, who flew to his birth country of Australia to say goodbye to his dying father while preparing to direct the play.
“I was able to bring that experience, and grief, to this show in a personal way,” Hansen says.
Hansen ultimately found that his loss helped him understand the importance of the party that shapes the second half of Airline Highway.
“If you don’t have the grief and the joy together, you don’t have the show,” the director says. “If you don’t have life and decay … you don’t have a life. One of the things that defines what life is, is that it ends.”
Hansen’s preparation for Airline Highway also included immersing himself in New Orleans history. He listened to regional musical genres like bounce music and zydeco. He familiarized himself with aspects of American culture referenced in the play, from the Iraq War to the opioid crisis to the gentrification indicator of a Trader Joe’s moving in across the street. He had his cast gather to watch Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, which covers the catastrophic failure of the levees around New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
He ultimately found that some of the issues faced by post-Katrina New Orleans remain relevant to his community now.
“It does feel very real to Charlottesville. It feels very real to America right now,” Hansen says. “Miss Ruby, in some ways, I feel like … she’s a figure of the U.S.A., this idea of Lady Liberty, this nurturing, ‘Welcome strangers, come live here, you’ll be allowed to practice your religions.’ And she’s dying, right? She’s being sort of squeezed out by all of these kinds of forces.”
Hansen, who first saw Airline Highway when it debuted at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, says the original production focused on the realistic parts of the story. In contrast, he’s leaning into magical realism aspects, such as working to visually evoke a line about tourists acting like “someone injected a cloud into their head.”
This new take on Airline Highway will mark the first show that offers $4.34 tickets to those 25 years old or younger.
Executive Director Lisa Capraro says the promotion is part of Live Arts’ attempt to counter rising costs, ranging from royalties to supplies, while seeing a decrease in grant funding at both the national and state level.
Capraro also thinks that bringing in a younger audience could ultimately change theater dynamics. “I imagine the audience, and the actors, of course, can play off that,” she says. “It’s going to take a little bit of time to see it get to that peak, but we’re hoping it gives us a boost of energy.”
