Courtesy Solas Nua

A nondescript K Street office is the unlikely site of a speakeasy where spies, scientists and a cruciverbalist run amok in Solas Nua's season opener, the musical Improbable Frequency. For season six, the Irish company is producing only site-specific works, and their first step out of the black box and into the city is 111 K St. N.E. And despite the staid sterility of Washington's unoccupied workplaces, director Matt Torney says that the empty office is the best kind of space to work in: A clean slate.

"The idea of performance spaces that aren't a theater offer new possibilities. It's a much more immersive experience." says Torney. "I think the only limits when you take the show out of the theater are the limits of your imagination."

Tourney says that when audiences step out of the elevator and into the temporary theater, they'll be transported to a World War II-era cabaret.

"We were drawing from the idea of clandestine spaces, like secret meetings in the back of pubs," says Torney. "It's a very evocative and dynamic space. We're interested in the audience, and the moment they step through the door, the performance begins."

And once the performance begins, Torney says it pulls audiences in the many directions of its competing inspirations: B movies, science fiction, spy thrillers and wartime romances, set to music – sort of like Darby O'Gill and the Little People meets The Producers, he quips. In Improbable Frequency, the poet John Betjeman travels to Ireland as a spy for England while the physicist Erwin Schrodinger comes to Ireland for research, and their overlapping missions spur a madcap adventure.

"On the surface, it's a musical about Irish neutrality, but what the writer really wants to talk about is national identity and stereotypes, and Ireland's relationship with England," says Torney. "While all of Europe was standing up against the Nazis, Ireland chose to stay neutral. Somehow, improbably, they managed to get out of everything unscathed. It's about this aspect of improbability and Irish history."

Torney, who is Irish, is the associate director of Dublin's Rough Magic Theatre Company, which first staged the American debut of the musical off-Broadway in 2008. He was excited to direct the musical in D.C., he says, because he thinks that Washingtonians will react differently to it than New York and Dublin audiences.

"The show was originally written in Ireland for Irish audiences. In Ireland, it's a story about people coming into our country, whereas when you do it in America, it's about going on a journey to a strange place," says Torney. "I've developed the American point of view, and use the stereotype that Americans have about Ireland and England to open it up and connect it to this city."

"Washington is an international city, and a diplomatic city, and since the play is about diplomats and spies, there's an immediate connection with people's lives here," says Torney. "A lot of the comedy comes from miscommunication between diplomats."

Washington audiences also overwhelmingly work in buildings like the K Street office the show occupies, but the transformed space may be the one part of the show that feels the most foreign. "Every site has its own story to tell," says Torney.