Mud Blue Sky

   “Exceedingly funny…poignant and closely observed… These Saint Louis–based flight attendants are very much products of the new airline realities… They are 50-ish veterans hoping to stay healthy and stave off the latest round of layoffs with their early retirement packages that get crummier with every offering. They stay in a lousy motel, the kind of place where the cable could not be more basic, you don’t want to touch the remote control with your bare hands and you have to go down to the desk to get your pillows. And they don’t find travel even remotely glamorous, not when there’s a kid at home alone and an overly solicitous T S A officer at every airport. These are women dealing with the daily grind through the hubs of life; there are themes in this play to which every road warrior, of the nonexecutive platinum sort, will relate. Which is not to say they don’t have a little fun… If you want to get all meta (and why not?), you might say that Wegrzyn is taking the idea of the stewardess on a layover, long a staple of the bedroom farce, and throwing her into a totally different kind of hotel with a totally different, and barely legal, potential lover and fellow adventurer. That theme gives this happily unpredictable 90-minute play a real patina of sadness, a sense of how a once-glamorous profession has been reduced to the quotidian by changing mores and corporate budget-cutters…there’s no funnier show in Chicago.”Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune   “There was a time when air travel was considered glamorous, but then, there was a time when baseball fans wore suits and hats to Wrigley Field (the past truly is a foreign country). The three veteran flight attendants at the center of Marisa Wegrzyn’s MUD BLUE SKY…bear little resemblance to the Pan Am stewardesses of the old days, with their fashionable uniforms and youthful air of freedom and adventure. Wegrzyn’s characters are lower-middle-class grunts at the mercy of cash-strapped airlines and rude passengers who leave unspeakable messes in the lavatory. Whereas the job may have once provided fresh opportunities for women—as long as they fit a certain mold—this play’s trio seem convinced they’re headed nowhere… Wegrzyn deftly blends comedy and despair as the characters attempt to cut loose—pot, porn, and cognac are involved—and forget that each of them is staring down a future that’s either uncertain, uninspiring, or both… The play is a funny and forgiving argument in favor of making human connections, however brief or tenuous.” Zac Thompson, Chicago Reader