For Immediate Release:
LISA D’AMOUR’S COMPELLING DRAMEDY AIRLINE HIGHWAY OPENS 35TH SEASON OF PASSION AT LIVE ARTS THEATER
August 19, 2025
Contact: Andrew Bryce, Marketing Coordinator/Media Contact
andrew@livearts.org or (860) 942-0575
Charlottesville, VA – Live Arts Theater’s Season of Passion 25/26 opens with an all-nighter celebration: the Tony-nominated AIRLINE HIGHWAY by Lisa D’Amour, a sprawling dark comedy. AIRLINE HIGHWAY, sponsored by Barbara & Jay Kessler, has 12 performances in the Gibson Theater, October 3 through October 19, 2025, at Live Arts Theater, 123 E. Water Street, in Charlottesville. Tickets are $30 for adults and $28 for students and senior citizens and are available through the Box Office at boxoffice@livearts.org, by phone at 434-977-4177 x123, or online at livearts.org.
Live Arts will host two special events for AIRLINE HIGHWAY: opening night reception following the performance on Friday, October 3, 2025; and post-show audience talk-back on Thursday, October 16 (7:30pm curtain). Audiences are welcome to enjoy beverages and concessions one hour prior to the performance and at intermission.
“… a beautiful and mesmerizing kaleidoscope of a play …” – New York Magazine
Home Sweet Home. The parking lot of the Hummingbird Hotel, one of those old-school places with a neon sign, on Airline Highway. During the course of 24 hours, the residents throw a glorious party to celebrate “last call,” a living funeral for Miss Ruby, former burlesque performer, Bourbon Street club owner and a mother figure to them all. AIRLINE HIGHWAY is a gentle portrait of this tight community, the bouncers, strippers, bartenders, hookers, handymen, poets, and other New Orleans outliers, who make their own family. As the night winds up and on and down, we learn all about their lives, their joys and their pain, and their ecstatic experiences.
“When Susan first approached me about directing AIRLINE HIGHWAY, I was absolutely thrilled to bring to life this dynamic world full of joyous, nuanced and fractured people,” says Director Jude Hansen. “It is an inspired choice to open the Season of Passion, as it delves into the lives of misfits kept down by the very institutions that should be supporting or uplifting their members. It’s a celebration of the people on the periphery of society that, despite falling through the cracks, have found joy, love, heartache, struggle but most of all CHOSEN FAMILY in each other. And … it’s the party of a lifetime!”
Live Arts production of AIRLINE HIGHWAY, directed by Hansen, features an outstanding ensemble of local theater artists: Haydn Haring as Krista, Paulius Sinkora as Bait Boy, Bella Hersman as Zoe, Andrew Akre as Wayne, Jim Dulaney as Francis, Christina Ball as Tanya, Mark Williams as Terry, Isaac Thorne as Sissy Na Na, Rovenia Brock-Riggins as Miss Ruby, and Rory Adams, Anne Blair, Mimi Halpern, AV Legere, Michael Moxham, Jackson Sample, Chelsea Smith, Gwyneth Fahy and Henry B. Lee as Ensemble and Understudies.
“Lisa D’Amour’s loving look at the makeshift family of misfits that hang out at a seedy motel along the old Airline Highway in New Orleans, is not a musical, but it is full of music.” – DC Theatre Scene
AIRLINE HIGHWAY’s creative team includes: Henry B. Lee (Assistant to the Director), Laura Mawyer (Assistant to the Director), Katherine Wang (Production Stage Manager), Lita Flowers (Assistant Stage Manager), Christine Jacobs (Dialect Coach), Ti Ames (Intimacy Choreographer), Liberty DeLeon (Vocal Coach & Movement), Daniel Kunkel (Fight Choreographer), Will Slusher (Scenic Designer), Kyle Schneider (Lighting Designer), Theo Teichman (Sound Designer), Chase Carson (Sound Engineer), August Applewhite (Set Dressing/Properties Designer), Mimi Halpern (Costume Designer), Rory Adams (Assistant Costume Designer), Cindy Lachance (Costume Assistant).
Performance History
AIRLINE HIGHWAY was commissioned and developed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and received its world premiere at Steppenwolf in December 2014. The production moved to Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre for a Broadway run in April 2015. AIRLINE HIGHWAY was a finalist in 2015 for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and earned four Tony Nominations.
About the Playwright
Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, educator and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans, Louisiana. She grew up in a world of ritual, activism, group spectacle and care, all of which continue to be expressed through her work. Lisa’s plays include Detroit (Obie Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn prize finalist), Airline Highway, Cherokee, Nita & Zita (Obie Award), Hide Town, The Cataract, Ten Thousand Things, and Anna Bella Eema; her work has been produced by theaters across the country, including MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.), Children’s Theater Company (Minneapolis), Catastrophic Theater (Houston) and ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans). Lisa’s company PearlDamour makes interdisciplinary, often site-specific works, including Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown, and MILTON, a performance and community engagement experiment rooted in five U.S. towns named Milton. She is currently the Distinguished Professor of Playwriting at the University of Houston.
- more below –
About the Director
Jude Hansen grew up as a choirboy in Australia, performing his first musical lead at age seven. This led to his first professional theater credit in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. He continued his love of theater as a writer, director, producer and performer and with performances at the National Shakespeare Festival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Two Gentlemen of Verona. He graduated with an MFA (acting) from the Chicago College of Performing Arts—Roosevelt University, and then worked throughout Chicago with The House Theatre, Piccolo Theatre, Redtwist, Shapeshifters, Halcyon, Pride Films & Plays, the Steppenwolf Garage Rep Series, and Redmoon theater companies. Directing highlights include Bedroom Farce, Look Back in Anger (his own adaptation with permission from the John Osborne estate), and the Jeff Award-winning The Submission, as well as BUYER & CELLAR for Live Arts.
Charlottesville acting credits include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Irvin) at CPG, As you Like It (Papa Corin) at UVA, and, THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA MCBRIDE (Rexy & Jason) and SILAS: THE UNINVITED at Live Arts. Most recently, he directed the smash hit production of KINKY BOOTS for Live Arts in 2024.
About Live Arts
Founded in 1990, Live Arts is celebrating 35 years of forging theater and community. Powered by more than 1,000 volunteers, Live Arts is a national model for engaged community theater, known for exceptionally high caliber productions, provocative programming and for supporting new works. Live Arts is guided by these organizational priorities: Artistic Integrity; Educational Excellence; Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion; and Volunteer & Community Engagement. As the anchor tenant in a four-story space, Live Arts proudly serves as a vital cultural resource in the heart of downtown Charlottesville with two state-of-the-art stages, rehearsal studio space, a library, and a rooftop event space.
The 2025/26 Season of Passion is made possible by:
The generous support of our show sponsors and C-VILLE Weekly, WTJU 91.1FM, PJ Networks Computer Services, the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, The Madwoman Project, The REA Charitable Trust, and hundreds of theater lovers. Live Arts is grateful for the support of Ting, our Pay-What-You-Can Sponsor, for making theater more accessible in our community. Live Arts is supported by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
For more information
Please contact Marketing Coordinator Andrew Bryce by email at andrew@livearts.org or (860) 942-0575; or phone at 434-977-4177 x103, or visit livearts.org.
