Knowing that Betty’s unfulfilled lifelong dream has been to travel the world and meet different people, combined with his desire to shield his friend from conversation, leads Froggy to tell everyone that Charlie is a foreigner who doesn’t speak a word of English. There’s the engaged couple Reverend David (Jay Sullivan) and Catherine (Elizabeth Bunch) Catherine’s duncey brother Ellard (Jeremy Webb) and the town building inspector, Owen (Chris Hutchinson). The combination of a stressful time, Charlie’s general social phobia and a belief that he’s utterly boring and worthless renders him apoplectic at the thought of having to make small talk with the lodge’s owner, Betty (Annalee Jefferies), and other guests. The getaway is purposefully timed to give Charlie respite from tending to his dying wife, who we learn is not quite as dedicated to the marriage as her dutiful caretaker husband. Sergeant “Froggy” LeSueur (Paul Hope) arranges a three-day mini vacation at a small-town American fishing lodge for his old English civilian friend Charlie Baker (Jeffrey Bean). The foundation of the story is actually quite simple and charming in an imperfect kind of way. It makes for a truly enjoyable production of what is otherwise a thin wisp of a repetitive, jokey idea that gets totally bogged down by an unfortunate toe dip into the cesspool of xenophobia.īut back to the plot. Director James Black leads his uniformly superlative cast with impeccable comedic timing that allows plenty of breathing room for characters to shine. Realizing I’m blowing the punch line long before the setup here, my feeling is that both sides are correct. I couldn’t afford any distraction as I attempted to reconcile these two wildly dichotomous viewpoints of a play that, love it or hate it, seems here to stay. I went solo, in case you’re wondering, not to deny what’s obviously a not so guilty pleasure from my mates. So much so that this is the third time the Alley Theatre has staged the show and the only time in this past theater season that friends overwhelmingly clamored to be my plus one opening night. But ask the audience how it feels about the show and you’ll get a whole different can of worms, and not just because the whole thing takes place in a remote fishing lodge somewhere in rural Georgia. We’ve called it a “contrived television sitcom” (Ben Brantley in The New York Times), accused it of “shallow plotting” (Joel Hirschhorn in Variety) and labeled it “simply mindless” and “dimwitted” (Bert Osborne in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). That he does fuels the nonstop hilarity of the play and sets up the wildly funny climax in which things go uproariously awry for the "bad guys," and the "good guys" emerge triumphant.Larry Shue’s 1985 farce The Foreigner is one of those pickle plays to review. Once alone the fun really begins, as Charlie overhears more than he should-the evil plans of a sinister, two-faced minister and his redneck associate the fact that the minister's pretty fiancée is pregnant and many other damaging revelations made with the thought that Charlie doesn't understand a word being said. So "Froggy," before departing, tells all assembled that Charlie is from an exotic foreign country and speaks no English. This time "Froggy" has brought along a friend, a pathologically shy young man named Charlie who is overcome with fear at the thought of making conversation with strangers. The scene is a fishing lodge in rural Georgia often visited by "Froggy" LeSeuer, a British demolition expert who occasionally runs training sessions at a nearby army base. Directed by: Michael Despars and Genni Klein
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