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The production, from the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, here presented by Manhattan Theater Club, brims with humor and pungent life. It features a flawless cast led by the Tony winner Julie White (“The Little Dog Laughed”), whose harrowing performance handily surpasses her superb prior work in lighter comedies. Ms. D’Amour’s play has a loose, baggy structure that sometimes works against it, but this aptly reflects the aimlessness of its characters, who live day to day and would rather not think about the unhappy past or the foggy future.

------New York Times

It's hard not to root for "Airline Highway," Broadway's only serious new American play in a spring season obsessed with light comedies and British imports. Lisa D'Amour's drama, a Steppenwolf production presented at Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway playhouse, has the sort of big, vibrant cast that's virtually unknown in today's theater economy. D'Amour's heart is with the eloquence of marginalized people -- the strippers, addicts, hookers and, naturally, a drag queen, who live, almost as a messy family, in the Hummingbird Motel, a dilapidated, post-Katrina New Orleans flophouse along the road in the title.

-----Newsday

"Airline Highway" does not go for the jugular nor rage with the anger that some in New Orleans legitimately feel. Although there is much color and sensuality, you could argue that any real-life Hummingbird would be far dirtier than the place created by the designer Scott Pask and by this cast. "Airline Highway" feels very much like the work of a hometown writer, whose first impulse is affection and surely not cold-eyed analysis. This still is a play that breathes the New Orleans air and, to his credit, Mantello offers a sophisticated reading of those rhythms, jagged and unpredictable, somnolent and then crackling with energy.

-----Chicago Tribune