From the very beginning Leslye Headland drops several hints about what she's up to in The Layover, her irresistibly intriguing new play at Second Stage.
The first clue is obscure: Sherrie (Annie Parisse) and Dex (Adam Rothenberg) strike up a conversation when the New York-bound plane they're on is delayed for Thanksgiving Eve takeoff. That alert--a meet-cute variation--is made less obscure when in their quizzing each other, Sherrie says she teaches a course in American crime fiction, and not too long after that crime author Patricia Highsmith enters the chat.
Highsmith's Strangers on a Train comes up, leading to an exchange where Dex asks Sherrie about her notion of the perfect murder, and she says, "The perfect murder is a murder with no motive"--to which he replies, "Like Strangers on a Train," and she comes back with the supposedly joke-y "Or plane."
There you have it. Headland, who also wrote the overrated Bachelorette, has a thing for Patricia Highsmith and so decides she'll pay homage by offering her own Highsmith-influenced opus, which she could just as well call Strangers on a Plane.
Anyway, the delayed takeoff turns into a cancelled flight and then--but you guessed this, just as all audiences will--Shellie, who's told Dex she's never been married, and Dex, who's admitted to being unenthusiastically engaged, are enjoying a one-night fling during which they both become more invested in each other than they'd intended.
That's when, in this intermissionless 90-minuter, Headland splits the stage--Mark Wendland is the deft set designer--between the sleek Upper East Side Manhattan flat where Andrea (Amelia Workman), Dex's chattering fiancée, lives with her preadolescent daughter Lily (Arica Himmel), and the more downscale Kankakee, Illinois home where Sherrie lives with her wheelchair-ridden father Fred (John Procaccino) and her drug-dealing husband Kevin (Quincy Dunn-Baker).
That's right, everything Sherrie told Dex about herself, other than her name, is a lie, making her a sister under the skin to Highsmith's talented Mr. Ripley, known to his hoodwinked friends as Tom. This plot twist also echoes "Edith's Diary," Highsmith's story about a desolate woman who leads an exciting life in her daily journal entries.
While Sherrie and Dex lead their separate existences--his is stage right, hers is stage left--they occasionally stare across the stage from their respective vantage points as if communing with one another.
Mostly, though, they're imprisoned in their families. She's stuck caring for the father with whom from time to time she can actually confide. He's stuck with a fiancée, who's on to his ambivalence about their future, and also with a potential stepdaughter only tolerant of him when he brings gifts. He's stuck there, that is, until Andrea tosses him out, and Lily gives him an offensive parting gesture. The precocious, sullen Lily does have perhaps the play's funniest line when she announces, "Nobody listens to Taylor Swift anymore." (Okay, the line might be funny to everyone but the iconic Swift.)
That Dex is doing more than thinking about Sherrie while she moons over him is revealed when she learns Fred's $16,000-plus hospital debts have been paid and, in a mirror scene, a private eye called Arno (Dunn-Baker again) reports to Dex on the lowdown he's collected about Sherrie.
The result of Sherrie's and Dex's being brought up to date is what appears to be intended as a second-night fling in the same hotel room they previously occupied. Don't, however, expect any further description of what happens then. Only be informed once again that this is a Patricia Highsmith-inspired work, and that's a poke theatergoers who've read Strangers on a Train will get that those who only know Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation won't.
Speaking of Highsmith and Hitchcock brings up more details about Wendland's ingenious set. When the production gets going--but the delayed plane doesn't--there's a five-foot-high line of upstage monitors showing images that add up to an airport runway panorama. Eventually, the monitors are reconfigured and reconfigured again. Early on, they shift to falling snow, complementing the storm grounding the plane.
Later, the monitors are employed for flashes of 1940-50s movie stars, flashes that go by so nanosecond-fast they're a challenge to identify. Among them, it should be possible to catch, say, Barbara Stanwyck in her 1944 Double Identity wig and Ruth Roman in a hat worn in the 1951 Strangers on a Train. Yup: another Highsmith hint-hint-nudge-nudge.
So if Parisse and Rothenberg are to The Layover what Roman and Farley Granger are to Strangers on a Train and Stanwyck and Fred McMurray are to Double Indemnity with that bombshell of a final confrontation, they're just as effective as their celluloid predecessors. They're decidedly sexy in the sex scenes, and the emoting in the later sequences is equally effective.
Trip Cullman is the director getting them down and dirty and keeping them there--with some lighter moments interspersed. He also reaps plenty from the other four cast members who might easily have come off as two-dimensional but don't.
By the time The Layover ends, Highland delivers an implicit message. Whether intentionally or not, she sends word that cheating lovers may get away with their actions in the short run, but in the long run, you better watch out. Highsmith, of course, never turned moralistic.