The Foreigner
By Larry Shue
Directed by Stewart F. Lane
Olney Theatre Center
Through Oct. 22
By Alexander C. Kafka
Enter the theater for The Foreigner and you'll pass a sign warning that the production involves fog and haze. Does it ever! And that's aside from the effects. The plot's built on fog and haze, and so's the development, and so's the outcome.
Two Englishmen, an amiable military explosives expert named Froggy (Field Blauvelt) and his shy friend Charlie (JJ Kaczynski) come to a fishing lodge in the rural Georgia outpost of Tilghman County. Froggy's in the area on business and has lodging elsewhere, and he's brought Charlie along, supposedly as a research assistant, but really just to give the poor bloke a break from his dire straits at home—his wife is fatally ill yet has urged him (however unselfishly) to take some time for himself. Charlie, who is socially awkward even under familiar circumstances, wants to be left entirely to himself during his stay at the lodge. Froggy arranges this, in a somewhat improvisational manner, by explaining to his pal, the lodge's owner Betty Meeks (Rusty Clauss), that Charlie is a foreigner, but Froggy gives no specifics, hinting that they're top-secret.
Betty, who is getting on in years, hasn't traveled, and is feeling down and not a little provincial, is thrilled by the guest's exoticism. She explains Charlie's linguistic innocence to the ex-debutante Catherine Simms (Lindsay Haynes); to her beau, the goodly Rev. David Marshall Lee (Clinton Brandhagen); to Catherine's slow-witted brother, Ellard (Ben Shovlin); and to the malicious property inspector Owen Musser (Delaney Williams). Immersed in a stew of overheard confidences and intrigues involving family inheritances, municipal skulduggery, religious duplicity, and the Ku Klux Klan, Charlie finds himself at first helpless, then drawn, to make sense of and influence them, acquiring, as he puts it, a personality in the process, and a new pseudo-Slavic language in which gok means yes and blit means no.
This sounds like rich ingredients for an irresistible farce, and nothing would please me more than to report that it is—but it isn't. Shue, a playwright and actor, died in 1985 at age 39 in a plane crash in the Shenandoah Valley, and I wish I could say that he'd left us with a comic gem. If he did, The Foreigner isn't it. That's not to say that it's awful—it's certainly not that either. Its wit hovers at a couple clicks above quality sitcom, and as a habitue of quality sitcoms I don't shrug that off. Whether it merits the undoubtedly handsome, conscientious treatment Olney is giving it under the direction of Broadway veteran Stewart F. Lane, not to mention audiences' time and money, is another question—and one I'm hesitant to answer. When The Foreigner played off-Broadway in 1984, critics were unenthusiastic but viewers gung-ho, enough for a 685-performance run.
It's not too hard to see how that split might have occurred. The Foreigner plays with timeless notions of the innocent, frolics in the seas of constructed language and quick, head-spinning absurdities, and downplays the threats of racism and religious radicalism in a manner that must have been winning in the Moral Majority days of Reagan's first term and that remains pertinent if not fresh. I associate its dramatic tool kit with the British—I'm thinking of Stoppard's Jumpers and Frayn's Noises Off, among other works—and maybe it's telling that it's two Brits that come to Georgia, even though Shue was inspired to write the play by experiences he'd had in Japan. That The Foreigner Osterizes these exotic motifs into a palatable American smoothie might explain why audiences found it accessible but refreshing. That its wit is pretty pallid in comparison to the British imports they were seeing could shed light on critics' coolness. Just a theory.
Beyond—or maybe short of—all that, I'd add the reservations that the work's setup is torturously forced, and that its comedy and menace blend poorly. Would that Klan members and their ilk were as easily freaked out as here, and that xenophobia were so quickly identified, quarantined, and treated.
For all that, I can't imagine a more amiable and sturdy production of the play than this one. The ensemble work is tight, the timing snappy, the tensions roiling. Blauvelt's Froggy is all have a glass on me and Bob's your uncle. Clauss's Meeks is fragile but tough, and pleasantly pixilated. Haynes's Catherine levels her loneliness and disenchantments at us like an air gun. Shovlin, as Ellard, is mighty sympathetic as the innocent's innocent to Kaczynski's Charlie. (They have a fun monkey-see, monkey-do table-manners scene.) Williams's Owen is like the lost scary Georgia cracker brother of George Wendt's Norm in Cheers. And Brandhagen's too-good-to-be-true Reverend is just that, and dives from saintly to snakey in good form. Kaczynski's Charlie, in the center of the real and figurative storms, is also fun. His pseudo-Slavic tongue, with bits of Italian and even a classic French film title thrown in for good measure, sounds, as he "acquires" his English, a bit like Baryshnikov on speed. In general, though, the cast's accents seemed a little Acme thick and sometimes roamed (like when Brandhagen got upset).James Kronzer's lodge set is grand, and technical director Sean Culligan's storms and explosions also top-notch.
And yet that's a lot of firepower for a few chuckles. So can I recommend it? Blit. Should you seek further counsel beyond the critical agonizing? Quite possibly, gok.
Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center. TOP: JJ Kaczynski as Charlie, Ben Shovlin as Ellard, Field Blauvelt as Froggy, Rusty Clauss as Betty, and Lindsay Haynes as Catherine. LOWER: Delaney Williams (top) as Owen and JJ Kaczynski as Charlie.
