Come Fly With Them

Fear not, woeful ticket buyers wearied of the immersive
theater experience. Things may look rocky during the pre-show tricks of Ars
Nova’s The Lapsburgh Layover, but
eventually everything will calm down.

A riotous send-up of dinner theater, The Lapsburgh Layover begins almost as soon as you’ve entered the lobby.
Audience members are handed customs forms and gold pencils and meander off
their “plane,” through the bowels of Ars Nova, before finally entering the
theater to be entertained during their hour-long layover. Along the way, actors
in the bizarre national dress of Lapsburgh—finally making a comeback as a
tourist destination after a messy incident with a plague of frogs—needle, joke
and tease.

Safely in your seat, however—VIPs get the table directly in front
of the stage—there will be only a few moments during the show that will require
any sort of action from audiences. And by that point, actors Justin Jain, Dave
Johnson, Leah Walton and Bradley K. Wrenn (all of whom wrote the script as
well) have so succeeded at imbuing the proceedings with a communal feel that
one doesn’t even mind clutching a spoon or fork in an attack position (don’t
ask).

The Lapsburgh Layover
(and the twisty, weird minds of its creators) has more up its sleeve than just
a spoof of dinner theater starring a washed-up movie star. The full extent of
the show’s ambitions don’t reveal themselves until the two-thirds mark; until
then, what we see is a spot-on, poorly written, laughably bad American
detective melodrama, starring Zelda (Walton), whose downward career trajectory
was traced in framed photos lining the basement hallway, and Oleg (Johnson) as
hard-boiled, dimwitted American detective Mick. Between scenes, Oleg, Olaf
(Jain) and Jeb (Wrenn) present PowerPoint presentations about the history of
Lapsburgh and serve the salad and entrées, none of which is anything expected.
Every now and then, the room shakes and plaster spills out of the ceiling and
onto the stage. And why do Zelda and her employees all freeze when a frog
starts croaking?

Director Oliver Butler keeps the increasingly bizarre Layover from feeling like an arbitrary construct, one of
those off-the-wall theater ideas that friends have one late, boozy night. The
Berserker Residents have constructed what amounts to an alternate reality, in
which citizens live in terror of frogs, clap a single time when applauding and
are obsessed with the idea of timeshares. Walton deserves a large portion of
the credit for her impeccable Zelda, equal parts Zsa Zsa Gabor and silent film
star Pola Negri. But Jain, Johnson and Wrenn are the trio who keep things
humming along, playing carefully detailed characters that seem as if they exist
even offstage. Watching these three men tackle the tropes of American film noir
as slightly dim Lapsburghians before returning to their adulation of Zelda and
their own petty quarrels is a joy.

Things take an unexpected turn into fantasy in Lapsburgh, but we are never anything other than fully engaged.
Sometimes, immersive theater can happen with just a script stuffed with
extra-credit jokes and gags, a talented cast and some seriously low-fi
effects—and all from the relative comfort of your seat.

The Lapsburgh Layover

Through Sept. 24, Ars Nova, 511 W. 54th St. (betw. 10th
& 11th Aves.), www.arsnovanyc.com; $20-$30.