The Herald-Palladium, 2/4/2010

Serious comedy

Twin City Players’ ‘The Foreigner’ relies on misdirection and straight approach

By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO
H-P Features Writer

ST. JOSEPH — Bob Myers is describing his wife when he suddenly begins to backtrack.

“She has years of experience on stage,” he says, before adding, “Oh, I’m going to get in trouble for saying that.”
Myers, a local theater staple himself, is directing his equally adept wife, Candace Seymour-Myers, surprisingly for the first time in the Twin City Players’ production of Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” which opens Friday for an 11-date run at the TCP Playhouse.

“I have to admit it was a little adjustment,” says Seymour-Myers, who has previously directed her husband in multiple TCP productions. “But I trust him as a director. It’s really been interesting for me to see the perspective he brings to the table.”

“Truth be told,” Myers says, “she’s really 10 times the director I am, but she’s been a good sport about it. She’s taken most of my direction.”

Seymour-Myers portrays Betty Meeks, the owner of a resort-style fishing lodge in rural Georgia, in Shue’s 1983 farce. The play, which won two Obie Awards and two Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best New American Play and Best Off-Broadway Production, centers on Charlie Baker (played by Lloyd Bolick), a guest at Meeks’ lodge, who is so pathologically shy that he is unable to speak. His friend, Froggy LeSueur (Allen Snyder), in an effort to ease Charlie’s suffering, tells the rest of the lodge that his companion is a native of an exotic country who doesn’t understand a word of English.

Suddenly Charlie becomes privy to an assortment of secrets and scandals freely discussed in front of him by visitors who believe he can’t understand them. There’s Catherine Simms (Christine Aranyos), the spoiled but introspective heiress and Southern belle; the Rev. David Marshall Lee (Adam Rowland), a seemingly humble preacher; Catherine’s younger brother, Ellard (Chad Roden), a simpleton who tries to teach Charlie how to speak English; and Owen Musser (Timothy Aranyos), the racist county property inspector who plans to oust Meeks and convert the lodge into a meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan.

What Charlie ultimately decides to do with the knowledge he’s accumulated is at the heart of “The Foreigner.”

“It’s not absurdist comedy like Monty Python or slapstick like the Three Stooges,” Myers says. “It’s driven by situations and characters kind of like ‘The Bob Newhart Show.’ The play relies on misdirection – misdirection of both characters and situations. You may think a character is one thing, and it turns out that they’re another.”

“The Foreigner,” which premiered in 1983 while Shue was still playwright-in-residence at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, opened off-Broadway on Nov. 1, 1984, at New York City’s Astor Place Theatre. Directed by Jerry Zaks with a cast that originally included Shue, Anthony Heald and Patricia Kalember, the play ran for 686 performances.

Shue, however, missed much of that success. In 1985, the 39-year-old playwright, died in a commuter plane crash in the Shenandoah Valley near Weyers Cave, Va.

Since then, “The Foreigner” has become part of the community theater repertoire. It even saw an off-Broadway revival at the Laura Pels Theatre in 2004. The 10-week production was directed by Scott Schwartz and starred Matthew Broderick, Frances Sternhagen and Neal Huff.

“I would do this show every year if I could,” says Bolick, who also has starred in community productions of Shue’s lesser-known 1981 play “The Nerd.” “Larry Shue was an incredibly funny guy. He had a very quick wit. What I think he added to this particular play was a bit of sentimentality. There’s a moral to the play, but it’s not moralistic. It would have been interesting to see what else he could have accomplished if he hadn’t died so young.”

Bolick, a Chicago transplant who made his TCP debut last November as defense attorney Barney Greenwald in the Myers-led second stage production of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” has previously directed “The Foreigner” and played the role of Froggy LeSueur, but this is his first time stepping into Charlie’s uncomfortable shoes.

“Playing a character who is supposed to be dull and boring without being dull and boring onstage is a challenge,” Bolick says. “You’re often on stage for substantial periods of time where you don’t have any lines. You just have to follow cues from the people around you and really listen and react honestly.”

Myers says it’s that ability to listen and react that usually determines whether the oft-performed comedy either suffers or thrives.
“Comedy can be extremely difficult to do on stage,” he says. “It’s far harder than drama. For the characters, what’s happening to them isn’t funny. So the actors have to know that they’re not trying to be funny. I’ve seen it played with a sort of wink to the audience and it just destroys it. The minute the character lets the audience know they think it’s funny, it’s not.”

In rehearsals, Myers has even gone so far as to have actor Timothy Aranyos portray his character as the hero of the story.

“You’ve got to be scared of Owen for it to work,” Myers says. “That’s why I told Tim to play Owen straight up. He may be the villain but villains always see themselves as the good guy so we’re taking that approach. Tim plays him with all the intensity of the hero of the show and it just makes it wonderful to watch.”

Myers hopes such serious tactics translate into big laughs come opening night.

“Sometimes you’ll come across a show that’s a few years old and the comedy just loses its edge,” Myers says. “Then you read a play like ‘The Foreigner’ that’s 27 years old and it still works. It’s still funny. This cast knows that instinctively. Most of my job is just getting out of their way.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com