The best humor often can't be detached from the world in which it exists. A funny line that can be easily quoted away from its source is also known as a joke, and that is a different route to a laugh. Mud Blue Sky by Chicago playwright Marisa Wegrzyn, a name new to me but one I'll remember, is a very funny play that defies efforts to encapsulate any particular dialogue that makes it funny. This is a good thing made better in Aurora Theatre's nifty production.
Describing the play's set-up might suggest a comedy of easy laughs built from wisecracks and slamming doors. Three stewardesses (excuse the anachronism for the moment) convene in a hotel room during a layover and set out to party. It might seem we are in the land of Boeing Boeing, the 1960s farce that ran for years and years in London and typified the notion of libidinous young beauties in a glamorous job in which they could travel the world and meet all sorts of sexy and/or rich men.
These aren't those women, but rather weary flight attendants of the modern jet age dealing with divorce, wayward teens at home, bad backs, lost jobs, and repellant passengers. While this might sound like the opposite of fun, Wegrzyn has devised a tiny universe in which life's absurdities can be explored in ways that become comic because there is recognizable truth behind the quips, arguments, resentments, and kindness that come forth on this one night in an airport hotel.
One of the three is actually a former flight attendant who lost her job because of her weight. The divorced Angie lives near Chicago, and a reunion with her two former colleagues is planned during the layover. While single mom Sam is ready to party, the sardonic Beth tries to beg off, claiming fatigue. But instead of climbing into bed, Beth heads out to the parking lot to hook up with the pot dealer she regularly engages while passing through Chicago. In this loony but believable world, the dealer is a dorky high school senior named Jonathan who arrives at the hotel in a rented tux. It's prom night, and his date has ditched him. Besides, she liked putting her tongue in his ear.
Soon enough, the whole gang is in Beth's room, with Angie supplying some very expensive cognac she once pinched from a passenger and Jonathan the weed, but not the really good stuff that went to Beth. All he has left is some pretty good stuff that he supplies to the others at a discount. They mostly mother him while not engaged in their own dramas that he observes with the astonishment of a kid watching grownups misbehave.
Director Tom Ross has found the rhythms and tones that bring forth the humor and occasional sorrow nestled in Wegrzyn's script. The cast occupies the characters with an equally skillful finesse, with Jamie Jones centering the play with her ever-so-truthful performance as the nearly, but not quite, burnt-out Beth. Rebecca Dines is the play's energizer as the too-ready-to-party Sam, and Laura Jane Bailey effectively delivers on the poignancy as the sacked Angie, who misses the camaraderie of even the shared misery of life as a flight attendant. As the be-tuxed Jonathan, Devin S. O'Brien is an adorable bundle of insecurities.
Mud Blue Sky is a play in which nothing much happens, at least in the standard sense of how plots work, but it's a showcase of how seeming evanescence can carry weight and humor mined in humanity provokes the best laughter.
Mud Blue Sky will run at Aurora Theatre through Sept. 27. Tickets are $32-$50. Call (510) 843-4822 or go to auroratheatre.org.