‘the Most Dangerous Highway In The World’ Goes Nowhere

The cars and trucks barrel along “The Most Dangerous Highway in the World,” a perilous mountain stretch in Afghanistan that forms the setting for this Golden Threads Productions world premiere. Playwright Kevin Artigue sets out to snatch bits and pieces of personal stories from the travelers and one hardy young Afghani entrepreneur and stitch them into a dramatic quilt of desperation and dreams. The gravity of the play’s subjects — death, traumatized families, the menace of the Taliban, a deeply dysfunctional state and its complex politics — demands the kind of treatment this static, thinly written pastiche can’t provide. The piece was “inspired,” according to the company, which is devoted to plays about the Middle East, by a 2012 New York Times feature on the so-called Pepsi bottle boys who direct traffic for tips on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad. Kiran Patel, a hard-working young actor who has to shoulder more of the drama than he or most anyone his age could, plays the boy on the highway’s edge here. A hustler who tries to sell two-day old fish when he isn’t waving trucks through curves and into and out of a nearby tunnel with his flattened soda bottle, Traffic (as he’s named himself) is a child who’s been forced to grow up too fast. Zarif (Terry Lamb) arrives dressed in rags, bleeding from a head wound and full of sad memories about his wife and child. Most of the heat and wan humor in Artigue’s scenes feels artificially induced, and his dialogue tends to devolve into pat bromides: By remembering you honor your parents. Patel conveys the kind of brusqueness a boy might effect under the circumstances, a facade that melts away when a soccer ball or some other diversion comes along.