Eva Skewes Photo
Stacey Strange, Dani Bobbi Lee, Nicholas Strange.
Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACES ECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
Layovers follows three travelers — a musician (Stacey Strange), a yoga enthusiast (Dani Bobbi Lee, Air Temple Arts executive director), and a salesman (Nicholas Strange, technical director) — as they wait in an airport terminal after their flights are cancelled for an indeterminate amount of time. The salesman makes his pitches, even as it’s revealed that he may not be quite as successful as he seems. The musician tries to keep her cool, to varying degrees of success. The yoga enthusiast struggles to maintain her inner peace. All this takes place in an environment that may or may not be growing increasingly hostile to them. And there’s a mystery involving an errant suitcase to unravel.
As the story, developed by the Stranges and Lee, is told, the audience is also treated to acts involving juggling, hula hoops, luggage antics, and diablo tricks that get more and more convoluted as the show progresses. The airport is a place of stasis. Without giving too much away, you could also say that it descends, inexorably and entertainingly, into chaos.
Work on the show started almost two years ago. “We had all these suitcases left over from a show that didn’t end up happening,” Stacey said. They learned that GreenStage Guilford was offering grants for artists to create new acts. Together the Stranges and Lee settled on an airport as a “weird and mundane enough setting” to be a blank slate for a show. “Any of these things” that happen in the show — the chance encounters among stranded passengers, luggage mixups, a sense of limbo and distorted time, even concerns about surveillance — “could kind of happen in an airport.”
They had a few ideas for a routine already. Nicholas had started building a certain surprise prop, and “I was very interested in using it,” he said with a laugh.
As the Stranges and Lee developed the show, they also developed their own characters, which, Stacey said, are “all very loosely based on our least favorite aspects of ourselves.” Stacey plays music, and “it wasn’t hard to reach for that level of neurosis and anxiety,” she said, also with a laugh. Lee’s based her character off of a certain aspect of herself in her 20s: “clueless and thinking that yoga is the identity.”
“She’s on a journey,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, but it’s all for the Instagram,” Lee said, also laughing.
As for Nicholas’s character, he has “a list of 100 jobs I would like to do,” he said. “They’re all scam jobs.”
Leaning into those least desirable traits meant being able to create more friction among the characters,. It also opened up more avenues for parody — of the setting, of themselves, and of the situation of being trapped someplace. Stacey was inspired by Sartre’s No Exit in the sense that the characters weren’t entirely likable; if hell wasn’t other people, “maybe purgatory is being stuck in an airport with other people,” she said.
The characters being grounded in an airport is mirrored in the nature of the circus acts. Air Temple Arts, as its name implies, often performs aerial acts, as it has in past performances. But for Layovers, “I wanted to do something that was more prop manipulation and juggling-based,” Stacey said. This required the Stranges and Lee to learn a lot of new skills, from a variety of circus routines to working with chairs as props to learning to use a looping pedal, as Stacey does for a musical interlude she performs on a guzheng, a Chinese zither.
The Stranges and Lee have been rewarded for their efforts. Keeping things on the ground and having a smaller cast has allowed Air Temple Arts to create a show that’s “a lot easier to tour,” and sure enough, Layovers has already been booked for performances in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania.
But first, it appears in New Haven, on May 4 — proof that even with both feet on the ground, you can still go places.
Layovers will be performed for two shows on May 4, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., at the ACES ECA Arts Hall, 55 Audubon St. For tickets and more information, visit the show’s website.