Nobody enjoys bad news, so let’s be brief regarding Bonnie’s Last Flight, which is a nice idea for a show that never gets off the ground both in terms of its writing and staging.
Playwright Eliza Bent’s concept is that viewers are the travelers aboard a regional airliner flight to Chicago. During the trip, the plane’s various crew members deal with their own ongoing personal issues, recall incidents from past journeys, juggle their emotional luggage and, oh yes, sometimes attend to the passengers. They even cope with unexpected turbulence.
In theory, the performance and audience spaces are merged into the cabin of the plane.
Potentially sounds like fun, right?
Sadly, the show that opened Wednesday at the Fourth Street Theatre is poorly composed, falteringly performed, and woefully under-designed.
The story centers on Jan (Barbara Walsh), a middle-aged flight attendant, who is happily going into semi-retirement after this journey to pursue her lifelong ambition to write fiction.
Working alongside Jan are two other attendants, Greig (Greig Sargeant), a longtime chum, and LeeAnne (Ceci Fernandez), a clumsy newbie. In the cockpit are the Pilot (Sam Breslin Wright), hazily drowning a hangover with beers, and his Co-Pilot (Federico Rodriguez), involved in a rocky romance with LeeAnne. The actors also portray other people as necessary, among them Ryan Secrest, a passenger whose allergic reaction to peanuts causes a crisis recalled in a flashback.
Another celebrity is Mark Twain (played by Bent in a grey wig and mustache), Jan’s inspiration as a writer, who roams the aisles dropping presumably pithy comments about these goings-on. Wondering about Bonnie of the title? That’s Jan’s faithful dog, stowed away in the cockpit.
During the flight, Jan receives bad news about her pooch and her dreams for the future.
Speaking of dogs, perhaps the script seemed amusing when read around the author’s kitchen table. Staged in an actual production, however, its facetious doings prove to be a pointless, humorless waste of 75 minutes. Annie Tippe, the director, has hired some accomplished actors who unsteadily try to find their bearings as Bent’s sketchily-written characters. It is apparent from their floundering performances that the director has not been able to help them.
If Meredith Ries, the set designer, ever had a workable scheme to turn a black box space into the cabin and cockpit of an airplane, she obviously was not given nearly the funds to do so. Chairs are arranged in a semblance of a wide body cabin, but that’s essentially the set.
This misguided event is produced under the auspices of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door series, which provides a stage and resources for companies and artists to produce their own work. Since this project began in 2017, it has subsidized worthwhile shows such as Houses on the Moon’s De Novo, a heartbreaking docudrama about a teenager facing deportation back to Guatemala.
As for this latest endeavor, let’s chalk up Bonnie’s Last Flight among the Next Door projects best quickly forgotten—and hope that it inspires no one to attempt making a musical comedy out of Airplane!
