Review: THE FOREIGNER Imports Laughs at Saint Vincent Summer Theatre

Farce season at Saint Vincent Summer Theatre is always a treat: the walk through a pictureque campus (now with trolley assistance for those not up for it), the hot dogs and popcorn on the terrace afterwards, and of course the play itself. After last year's Unnecessary Farce, a very up-to-date show with surveillance cameras, sex tapes and the internet, director Greggory Brandt is taking things back to basics, returning to Saint Vincent's proudly retro identity with Larry Shue's famous farce The Foreigner. 

It's the early eighties, in a small Georgia fishing lodge, where pathologically shy Englishman Charlie (Lawrence Lesher) has been talked into a getaway by his more gregarious friend, military demolitions expert Froggy (Timothy J. Cox). Charlie can't stand the thought of anyone speaking to him, so Froggy impulsively whips up a lie: Charlie is a foreigner from an undisclosed country, who speaks and understands no English. This works, at first, until the Georgia locals start to take a shine to their supposedly foreign guest, and Charlie begins to find new strength and personality in the guise of this kooky outsider. Unfortunately, he's also accidentally found a few sleeper agents for a white nationalist terror cell...

If the summer-stock company at Saint Vincent has a leading man, it's probably Lawrence Lesher, a fixture in their farces for several years now. Lesher has the comedic bluster and comic timing of a Kelsey Grammer or David Hyde Pierce (master farcers themselves), and watching him shift between timid English Charlie, bold and goofy Foreign Charlie, and a third persona he finds in Act 2 is a delight. Lesher has fantastic comic energy paired with the rest of the cast, particularly with Danuta Jacob as Betty Meeks. The role of lodgekeeper Betty requires someone who can play "a sweet old grandma type who is also kind of an idiot" without making the character cloyingly sweet or annoying, and Jacob strikes exactly the right note. (Animation fans will be almost instantly reminded of Tree Trunks from Adventure Time.)

Megan Taylor, last seen as a jittery cop in Unnecessary Farce, gets a wonderful showcase here as prickly ex-debutante Catherine, who has grown sick of her life as the "nice Southern belle." She plays wonderfully off Nathan Bell as Ellard, her mentally-handicapped brother. Bell has a tricky needle to thread here, making an old-fashioned "halfwit" role realistic and compassionate while still funny. In Bell's hands, things work out well: he plays Ellard with a mixed sharpness and dullness where we can see the wheels turning, even though they're not all connected. There IS something wrong with Ellard neurologically, we're led to believe, but he's not the total loss so many have assumed him to be. Bell's double-takes and "just starting to catch on" physicality, as he discovers a kindred spirit in goofball Charlie,  are a comic highlight.

Farces demand scenery-chewing, and Thom Brown III gets to fulfill that requirement with glee as redneck Owen Musser. One of the oddities of The Foreigner is the way in which it fuses conventional farce with melodrama: the goofy comedy of misunderstandings is butted up against, and eventually fuses with, a melodramatic tale of terrorism in which a cell of KKK members have a plot to take over the state of Georgia, and it's MOSTLY not played for laughs. When Musser goes on an explicit racist diatribe in Act 2, the energy of the whole play shifts momentarily from silliness to shock. Then Lawrence Lesher leaps onto a table and diffuses the tension with one of his goofiest moments; it's that kind of show.

On the technical end, Saint Vincent shows have rarely looked or sounded better, thanks to lighting and sound by Jesse Madden and his team. More than most of the recent farces, this show relies on good sound design, with offstage or prerecorded dialogue as a recurring element due to the high action level. I mentioned earlier, and have written in the past, about Saint Vincent Summer Theatre finding its niche as a proudly old-fashioned company, hearkening back to the vintage days of summer stock and theatrical comedy, but time marches on. The slick technical sheen the lighting and sound gave to this modern production of an old-school play prove that the oldies aren't dead. Some things, like farce, and summer stock, and a hot dog and popcorn after a performance, will never go out of style. Here's to many more seasons with something old AND something new.

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