Fly the delayed skyways: Broom Street Theater's Lounging Around

Writing a play or making a movie in the American Southwest or, say, at the pyramids of Giza makes it easy to get the audience involved. These settings can fire up the imagination, even for audience members who've never been there. On the other hand, the setting of an airport boarding area in Broom Street Theater’s current production, Lounging Around (running through July 26), presents a paradox: Anybody who has been to an airport can relate, but no one wants to remember being there.

It’s a challenge few would undertake. Most movies with airport scenes usually use them as settings for intrigue or crashes, not character studies. While Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg technically made money with The Terminal, it was hardly a great success by either man’s career standards. Even Eric Simonson’s play Lombardi: The Only Thing, produced in 2007 by the Madison Repertory Theatre, spruced up its lengthy airport scene with Vince Lombardi hallucinations à la "Don Juan In Hell."

That said, Broom Street playwright Siobhan Edge takes up the challenge of dramatizing an ordinary plane delay with gusto. She also proves that, as much as the United States likes to claim the title of humanity’s mixologist, the bus stations, train stations, and airports of the world are its true melting pots and its great equalizers.

Edge, who also plays multiple roles and designed the costumes, explains in her notes that a long trip to the UK inspired the idea for the play, which focuses on the strange camaraderie and openness that evolves from sharing a dismal situation with people you know you’ll never see again. The cast of 12 handles more than 20 characters who pass through a boarding area during a fog delay.

There are the standard characters and props: the baby, the pet, the quarrelling couple, the chatty cell-phone user, the frightened flyer, the drunk, and the annoying brat. And the not-so-standard: a pair of nuns, a dildo, and a corpse.

Despite the ever-present reminder of death, Edge and director Ben Doran manage to keep the tone light. The play clocks in a little more than an hour (mercifully short compared to a real plane delay). Sex jokes run rampant, and they aren’t all of the double-entendre variety. If there were a law on conversations about bodily fluids, it would have been repeatedly broken.

The cast keeps the play light on its feet as well, with quick delivery, plenty of exits and entrances, and only a few moments of bona fide scenery chewing. Cassi Harris is a standout as a pink-clad flight attendant who is perky to the point of psychosis, and Edge shifts characters and accents as easily as she changes her hats. Best of all, no one takes off their shoes, and unlike some airlines, Broom Street gives out free peanuts at the end of the flight.