If you’re paying attention, the show starts as you’re queuing out front to buy your tickets (which come in two varieties: first class and “penny pincher”). Your boarding pass gets you into the cabin, but not before you’re asked to pay 10 cents for each carry-on you bring in. I was charmed enough by the request to shell out two nickels for my backpack (though I expect my editor to reimburse me). Over-the-hill—way over the hill—stewardesses make the rounds seating passengers, attempting to collect more money (a “runway fund” that can get you a pillow—even if another passenger already has it) and generally preparing for takeoff.

Apparently the latest in Cynthia Galles’s “Beyond the Valley of the Flight Attendants” series, Beyond Retirement gets airborne with some quasi-improvised audience participation, then devolves into a series of somewhat disjointed vignettes that string together a story concerning impossibly cheap Super Saver Airlines and its mostly aged “stews” (their word), who must maintain their careers until 85 to qualify for Social Security in this brave new world. The cast earnestly delivers a litany of standard-issue jokes about aging and airline cutbacks; an amusingly ironic twist on the latter comes early, as on this flight of fancy you actually get more in the way of free snacks than you would in a real airplane: I enjoyed a glass of Chablis and some ranch-flavored corn nuts.

The misadventures of Flight 666, on which you are a student nearing graduation from your “get over your fear of flying” class, include problems with the piloting of the plane, a Madonna sighting or two, a near-death experience, and a lone young stew’s anxiety that she’ll end up like her co-workers. You survive the landing, you graduate, you get treated to a musical number.

Beyond Retirement is corny, and it’s with good reason they don’t hand out Tonys for corny. But it’s breezy fun if you like that sort of thing, and pretty much everyone deplaned with a smile.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS: BEYOND RETIREMENT THE FOUND THEATRE // 599 LONG BEACH BLVD // LONG BEACH 90802 562.433.3363 FOUNDTHEATRE.ORG // FRI-SAT 8:30PM // $12-15 // THROUGH AUGUST 30

Tags: BEYOND RETIREMENT, BEYOND THE VALUE OF THE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS, CYNTHIA GALLES, found theatre, Long Beach, Theater