Review: It's Time to Check in for "Airport and the Strange Package"

Airport and the Strange Package

Written by Sean King

Directed by William Roudebush

Presented by Great Cannonball Productions at Gene Frankel Theatre

24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC

August 7-25, 2024

L to R: John Daniel Meehan, Michael Kishon, and Kyle McIlhon. Photo credit: Florence Rossiello
It would be difficult to find people who enjoy what the protagonist of Sean King's new satirical play Airport and the Strange Package describes as the multi-hour humiliation inflicted on travelers before they get on a flight. One of the questions that Airport and the Strange Package asks is that of why we acquiesce. In the tradition of writers such as Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller, this very funny production presents the individual caught in the gears of absurd and dehumanizing institutional machinery; and, more particularly, it examines the way in which security theater–and the acceptance of it–functions as a gateway to ever-increasing/evolving surveillance and Foucauldian discipline.

In a nice touch, the show sets a bit of atmosphere on the way into the theater, with a "flight attendant" staffing the Gene Frankel's bar and complimentary water and peanuts on hand (along with the bar's usual offerings available for purchase–again, if perhaps less intentionally, like on an airplane). As the play begins, a traveler (Michael Kishon)–we don't learn his name until significantly later, reinforcing his Everyman quality–waits for his flight to Wilmington near the restrooms at an unnamed airport when a stranger (Connor Chase Stewart) suddenly appears, deposits a package wrapped in brown paper next to him, delivers instructions to place it in a certain overhead compartment, and just as suddenly disappears into the crowd. The traveler, conditioned by the ubiquitous announcements about suspicious packages and luggage tampering with which we are all familiar, notifies a police officer (Peter Sullivan), and thus begins a seemingly endless ordeal that shuffles the traveler from office to office and official to official while everyone assures him that he will still make his flight and that all of this is in fact in the best interests of himself and his nation.
Michael Kishon and Joshua Boyce. Photo credit: Florence Rossiello
The longer the traveler, who is repeatedly presented with choices that aren't really choices (much as how one can "choose" not to use the subway by refusing a random bag check), remains trapped in the TSA's procedures for dealing with a "strange package," the more he transitions from obedient, good-faith efforts to do the right thing to debating and poking holes in the logic of airport security theater. The traveler's trials unfold on a set, designed by James Dardene, dominated by gray walls, evoking blank bureaucratic spaces (while temporally, the play's 2019 pre-pandemic setting allows for some jokes about Homeland and how people would never put up with being forced to wear masks on airplanes). Notwithstanding the traveler's Everyman status, we do learn some things about him personally, including his ethnicity–which both gives officers Stan (Kyle McIlhon) and Hule (John Daniel Meehan) an opening for some untoward jokes and plays a significant role in the play's conclusion–and his objection to putting his 5-year-old child on Ritalin, which gestures to another domain of our culture of compliance and control. McIlhon and Meehan, as the officers with whom the traveler spends the most time, make for a fabulous comic pair, with Kishon adeptly holding down the role of straight man, proactive and rational but increasingly pushed towards a breaking point. Sullivan's multiple rule-bound officers and machinating chief, Joshua Orsi's largely disinterested x-ray technician, Joshua Boyce's memorably flirty TSA agent and terpsichorean custodial worker, and even Stewart's briefly appearing airline employee round out the show's roster of highly entertaining performances.
Kyle McIlhon and Peter Sullivan. Photo credit: Florence Rossiello
As the play makes us laugh, it also makes us think about how we literally pay, both in ticket purchases and government funding–though this is not to say that both TSA and airline employees are not still underpaid–to be treated inhumanely. It also brings to mind how the argument that one incident is too many seems to apply when large businesses would be harmed more than it does in other areas of American public life (say, elementary schools). Airport and the Strange Package goes beyond satirizing the risibility of one particular government agency to highlight some of the larger implications of the cultivation of a culture of suspicion and reminds us that complicity is one area in which we do have an actual choice.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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