Interview: Leslye Headland's LAYOVER Plans Run Amok

THE LAYOVER is not just about a delayed flight and a couple who meet cute.

It's a cat and mouse game with no rules. And lots of steamy sex. Bikini bodies.

Shellie, played by Annie Parisse, is an erudite professor of film noir avoiding family over the Thanksgiving holiday. She's terrified of being on an airplane. Or is she?

Dex, played by Adam Rothenberg, is an almost-too handsome-stranger on a plane who kills the conversation by talking about his fiancée. Despite this burst of honesty, the couple take advantage of a free hotel room and enjoy their layover together.

Playwright Leslye Headland chatted about the nature of truth and intimacy before a recent preview.

"When intimacy is involved it becomes an emotional and physical reality and the nature of truth is very skewed," said Headland. Shellie weaves fanciful stories that seduce Dex. They banter with philosophy and flirt with danger.

"I think that the pair of them bonded so well because they reflect back the truth to each other," Headland said. "They don't have it in their lives, and they feel more comfortable facing it with each other."

Shellie's character was based on Edith in Patricia Highsmith's psychological thriller EDITH'S DIARY. "She's such a reliable narrator," she said of the 1977 novel's protagonist.

"She's confident in what is real and important," Headland said. "When the novel shifts back and forth from real life to fantasy, she starts to realize that even if we have a confident inner life, it doesn't guarantee we have a secure exterior life."

EDITH'S DIARY juxtaposes fantasy with reality, much like Shellie in THE LAYOVER. "Highsmith is such a feminist writer and doesn't have Edith explain her choices," Headland said. "There's no one to blame but herself."

Headland had fun playing with the main characters, and has empathy for them both. "I don't think Dex thinks too much of it, in a weird way," she said of their cheating.

"I love how open Dex is. Shellie, we discover, is not being upfront. She's playing a part as slimy as Dex," Headland said. "He has a fiancée; he's cheating. He's being very upfront and direct.

"Basically, he makes a proposition for that one night and that's it," Headland said. "And the person being really shady and deceitful is actually being much more honest than he is. Then he feels betrayed, he gave himself up to her fantasy and this is what he gets," she said of the ramifications of their strange encounter.

We learn that Shellie's father (John Procaccino) is in a wheelchair, and her husband (Quincy Dunn-Baker) is stealing Dad's pills.

We learn that Dex and Andrea, played by Amelia Workman, are toxic as a couple. It isn't pretty, and X-rated language is thrown around Andrea's 11-year-old daughter, Lily, played by Arica Himmel. Of course she picks it up.

"Dex gave in to Shellie's fantasy," said Headland. "And he wanted to escape his own life by trying on hers. He wants to know why he can't be the person from Kankakee, Illinois, who teaches Patricia Highsmith. That hometown, by the way, comes from Fred MacMurray, who was born there.

"I loved him in DOUBLE INDEMNITY," she said. "I decided to sneak in that little Easter egg,"

But things turn ugly toward the play's end, after Dex tracks down Shellie. "The more he boxes her in, the increasingly more anxious and frustrating and hopelessly violent he becomes," she added.

Headland thinks there's a danger for the 35-year-olds and younger who date via social media. "I think people who are dating on apps like Tindr like the idea you can have sex without intimacy," she said. "And the point of the play is you can't. So much of dating now is about disposable intimacy.

"Maybe this is a morality play," she laughed. "They weren't going to swap murders like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN."

THE MALTESE FALCON is another of her favorites.

"I watched THE MALTESE FALCON a lot with my dad," Headland said. "Humphrey Bogart called Lauren Bacall 'Slim' in the movie and that's what my dad called me."

The Layover is playing at Second Stage Theatre's Tony Kiser Theater, 305 West 43rd Street.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos