REVIEW: FRESH MOUNTAIN AIR at Drayton Arms Theatre 14 – 18 January 2025

‘exciting premise but the execution of the play leaves a lot to be desired’ ★★

Fresh Mountain Air promises to be a high-tension, high-stakes drama. Three women who have never met before stay in a secluded cabin for a hiking weekend, but things quickly go awry when they return from a hike to find their cars gone and their BnB host Miranda missing. With no Wi-Fi and a quickly setting sun, they have no choice but to hunker down for an uneasy night. And that’s before they learn that four prisoners have escaped from a nearby maximum-security facility…

But the execution of the play’s exciting premise leaves a lot to be desired. The play’s promotional materials pose the question: Is the threat outside the cabin or within? The answer, regrettably, is neither. Inside the cabin, we have three women: Alyssa (Juliana Galassi), Leslie (Olivia Cordell), and Kayla (Julia Thurston). Their racial, socioeconomic and geographic differences do cause some tension – Alyssa’s audacity to be from Houston is an early stumbling block – but these moments of friction never spill out into anything more serious. At no point does it feel like one character might turn against the others. Outside the cabin, there is in theory a serious threat: the unending stream of escapees from the maximum-security prison that clearly doesn’t live up to its title. However, at no point does it truly feel like the women are at risk of a prisoner breaking into the cabin, as the forest outside the cabin’s interior – where the play’s action occurs – never feels real. The set, in fact, feels wholly disconnected from the outside world. When Alyssa peers out the ‘cabin window,’ it is hard to suspend disbelief and buy into the idea that she’s not peering into the audience. On top of this, most of the casualties in the play are characters we never see and lack any meaningful connection to. Miranda’s disappearance, for example, might have created some sense of peril had we actually met her. 

Thematically, the play serves up a smorgasbord of topics central to modern American politics: Trump, guns, racism, sexism, the healthcare system, the school system, the geographic divisions of the US, illegal immigration, and legal immigration. However, the exploration of these topics often feels shallow, with the play mistaking outlandish remarks for meaningful commentary. The central theme of the play, guns, comes to the fore when Alyssa finds Miranda’s loaded gun in a kitchen drawer. Here, the play offers more substance, exploring the sense of security guns can offer, the silent support for the Second Amendment, and how a liberal’s aversion to firearms can quickly go out the window when they feel threatened. The play also tackles head-on the devastation guns can wreak, even when they’re in the hands of a well-intentioned person. However, the play fails to stick the landing here as many of the plot beats leading up to Alyssa’s ill-fated choice to shoot the gun twice stretch credulity. To give one example, we learn that an unlucky UPS driver – the victim of Bullet Number One – got shot in the chest, staggered back to his truck, drove twenty miles to a police station, gave an account of where and how he got shot, and then promptly died.

For all its flaws, there are still things to enjoy in this play. There were many moments of humour early on in Michael Eichler’s script, with Cordell’s snarky lawyer getting the best gags. Also, as a Lana del Rey fan, I can’t fault director Penny Gkritzapi’s choice in music. 

Fresh Mountain Air by Michael Eichler / Drayton Arms Theatre / 14 – 18 January 2025