Before the partying ends there will be eruptions that further define the lives under inspection in the broad canvass that has been painted for us, along with the message that no human being is disposable, even as the gap increases between the haves and have-nots of society.

D’Amour has packed the play with an assortment of types, often amusing as they mask the limitations of their lives, and situations that reveal aspects of the characters. The first act is largely given to showing us who these people are, surviving in the motel, effectively designed on two levels by Scott Pask. An excellent cast makes the inhabitants come vividly alive, and director Joe Mantello knows whom to highlight and when in accordance with the playwright’s overview.

Foremost among the residents is Tanya, given a brilliant performance by Julie White, who holds the group together even while having to keep herself from falling apart. She is still turning tricks, and has a wrenching past that is barely referred too. She has a big scene in the second act in which she pops pills and erupts in a display of hysteria, and White does a memorable job, much different than the often amusing roles I have seen her play.

The party for which she has led in organizing is for Miss Ruby (Judith Roberts), who is dragged from her room on a stretcher, down a staircase, and into the parking lot where the festivities occur. She is pretty much out of it, except when she sits up, rises to the occasion and gives the play’s defining speech.

Another key character, although clichéd, is African-American in drag, Sissy Na Na, flamboyantly portrayed by K.Todd Freeman. There is also desperate Krista, movingly enacted by Caroline Neff, who has worked as a stripper and bar gal, and doesn’t have a home but has come back to her former haunt. She is still hurting from an affair she had with Bait Boy (Joe Tippet), who calls himself Greg and has moved to Atlanta and a slightly better life with an older woman. He returns with his so-called stepdaughter, Zoe, 16 (Carolyn Braver), who has a sociological school assignment to interview the folks at the motel and whose ultimate report under a solo spotlight reveals her youthful perspective.

You get the drift. There are other characters making up the play’s population, often colorfully, all adding up to the portrait of community, artificial to be sure for the purposes of the play, as it is unlikely such a motel would have so-many long-term residents instead of transients, but a concentration of humanity gaining strength by existing side by side and caring for one another in contrast to how society b passes people like them.