Review: A Road Trip Brings a Change of More Than Just Scenery in "Interstate"

Interstate

Written by Amina Henry

Directed by Cat Miller

Presented by Dixon Place and That OId Hillside at Dixon Place

161A Chrystie Street, Manhattan, NYC

December 4-20, 2025

Being a parent can be hard. So can being an adolescent. The collision of these truths propels Amina Henry's tightly constructed new play, Interstate, which pays equally multifaceted attention to both a mother and her children as they wrestle with finding happiness, each other, and themselves during a cross-country road trip to see America (a nation that proactively works to make being a parent more difficult). The journey that Interstate takes the audience on is deeply funny as often as it's incontestably poignant, all of which is only intensified by small irruptions of strangeness along the way.

Flight attendant Red (Amy Hargreaves), the mother of our protagonist family, touches on a different meaning of strangeness in the play's opening scene, when, as part of discussing her anxieties about raising–and knowing–her children, she describes feeling like they are strangers who came out of her own body. She also opens the scene by saying that this world requires a certain amount of alcohol consumption, a line that is funnier without any context than it comes to look retrospectively. Motivated by a troubling incident involving her elder, college-aged child (Willow Wilhelm), who is struggling with identity issues, single parent Red is taking both her children on a car trip from the East Coast to California, where her mother, who also raised Red as a single parent, lives. Robin (Marvelyn Ramirez), the younger sibling, is also in the midst of the messy process of self-definition (as far as an unending process can have a midst), which is made more difficult by feeling like the less loved child. Red says that she wants her children to see and appreciate their own country, its landscape and its people, but her meandering route seems to involve checking in on past boyfriends as much as it does checking out tourist attractions. At various stops, the trio also meet an assortment of attendants, guides, and other strangers in encounters that sometimes have more than a touch of absurdity to them: one delightfully unexpected moment sees a safari guide (Wesley Zurick) suddenly reveal a part of the set to be something quite different before he breaks into song, and later, Robin fervently describes what can only be called a vision to a hitchhiker (Sauda Aziza Jackson) she randomly meets at a picnic table but cannot seem to understand the woman's replies. As these encounters with people and places contribute to the potential for Red and her children to be less unknown to one another, how ready are they for the consequences of what they learn?

Movement (associated with change) and stasis occupy a central place in the play's symbolization of its themes. Images of flight and birds are introduced–and complicated–during an early stop in Philadelphia where the members of a tour group (Sauda Aziza Jackson and Nicholas Louis Turturro) are hilariously better at interpreting a mural than the tour guide (Wesley Zurick) is. The car itself of course represents and enables mobility, yet Robin complains at one point, "I feel like we're moving, but we’re not doing anything, like, nothing’s happening," and indeed, the part of the set that serves as the car (and, at one point, a boat), remains stationary–until a key moment. The abstract backdrop projected onto the rear wall is green for most of the play and suggests both foliage and the lines on a map, while the show's title itself suggests movement, change, and liminality. Many of the questions that Interstate raised about the possibility of personal and generational change are tied specifically to (American) womanhood, which Red talks about as requiring an immoderate amount of strength. At the same time, Red is very attached to some traditional ideas around men and masculinity; and her exes may be different men–Texan military veteran Mike, for instance, offers an outward contrast to midwestern weed-enthusiast Henry–but having them all played by Jeorge Bennett Watson helps to underscore the sense that they are all variations on the same man (a sense which also echoes other repetitions and circularities hinted at in the play). All of the principal characters are compellingly flawed. We can recognize that Red doesn't always make the best decisions as we simultaneously sympathize with her frustration at her kids' resistance to her attempts to bond with them and with their annoyance with their parent. Robin, to take another example, may evince the now-typical teenage focus on various things giving her "anxiety" but is also a healthy eater and feminist while the adults around her are into drinking, drugs, and speaking of women as consumables (not that those first two are necessarily bad in and of themselves). Like identity, family here is complex–love and concern coexisting with friction and discord–and far from static.

Zurick, Jackson, and Turturro each deliver great moments in their multiple roles, and Watson is terrific as the exes but especially, uproariously funny as Mike. Ramirez invests the initially resistant Robin's beginning to open up with wonderful nuance; Wilhelm brings fantastic warmth, vulnerability, and emotional weight to their character's transformative arc; and Hargreaves wholly captivates as Red's anger, resentment, and loneliness battle with her resilience, self-awareness, and profound love. The show includes a scene of joyful dance to a well-known song, but it's one of the play's original songs (with music by Zurick and lyrics by playwright Henry), first sung by the abovementioned safari guide, that we would like to adopt as our personal theme song. Near the end of the play, we hear that the Lonely Planet guide that the kids would occasionally read aloud from has been left behind at one of their stops, suggesting the freedom–and challenge–of defining one's own journey. But even as the path forward for these characters stretches out uncharted, Interstate always knows exactly where it is going.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards