John Tweel and Madeleine Carr in ‘Improbable Frequency’. Photo by Dan Brick.

The Capital Fringe Festival may be a hot, steamy, distant memory, but don’t tell Solas Nua that. To open their sixth season, the theater company has tapped into that festival’s rag-tag, anything-goes spirit with their first musical, Improbable Frequency. The play, written by Arthur Riordan, with music by an Irish group known as Bell Helicopter, actually did start out as a Fringe hit: at the Edinburgh festival in 2006. With their D.C. production, Solas Nua takes over a bare, as-yet-unused floor of a new office building on K Street NE, and transforms it into an alternative performance space that makes full use of the size and openness provided.

The tone is set before one even gets to the space. This is a show about spies, so programs are handed out in the building’s lobby in top secret file folders, and audience members are given a password which must be repeated to an usher on the upper floor before exit from the elevator will be granted. The seating is cabaret-style, small tables with a few chairs at each, and given that much of the show takes place in bars and clubs, the effect is to draw the audience into the production.

And what a completely batty, unapologetically goofy production it is. Lovers of rapid-fire wordplay will be in heaven, and if ludicrous puns make you laugh instead of cringe, this show has an abundance. The setting is Dublin, 1941, where Tristram Faraday (Eric Messner) has just been sent, due to his prodigious talents with crosswords and anagrams, to break coded German messages.