The Foreigner is a silly, improbable play that comes across as a small comic masterpiece, thanks to a superb production at the Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace. Larry Shue, who wrote the play, had the makings of a very talented playwright before his untimely death in a 1985 plane crash at the age of 39. Prior to the tragedy, Shue was an actor with three full-length plays to his credit, including The Nerd and Wenceslas Square. The Foreigner begins with a promising comic premise. An Englishman named Charlie Baker is brought to a rural resort by an English friend. Charlie is a morbidly shy man entangled in an unhappy marriage to a promiscuous woman back in England. Charlie is terrified of talking to strangers, so his friend tells the locals at the resort that Charlie is a foreigner who can't speak or understand English.
The idea is that Charlie would be cut off from verbal discourse and thus left alone. The concept allows Charlie to sit like a fly on the wall as private conversations buzz around him and characters confide in him, believing he can't understand what they are saying. He also discovers that people take to his "foreignness" and he finds himself in the unlikely position of being liked. Charlie blossoms under the attention and finds he has a personality after all.
That's one comic strand. The storyline also involves a smarmy young clergyman and his redneck companion, who plan to take over the resort as a base for the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. The final scene is a face-off between white-sheeted Klan members and Charlie and his new friends from the resort. The play is really a sequence of set pieces, including several language lessons between Charlie and the other characters. Charlie tells an animated story from his "home country" that allows actor Paul Slade Smith to trot out his estimable bag of comic tricks. Smith combines mime and a pidgin tongue that sounds vaguely Eastern European to recount a pseudo dramatic tale that the audience finds hilarious. The Foreigner is an uneasy blend of farce and serious social matters. The KKK is no joke, even when its representative is Owen Musser, a bloated superstitious redneck.
The other villain is a Christian minister, a type who has populated the headlines in recent years. Director Ray Frewen once played Owen several years ago, and he has maximized the play's humor and melodrama and minimized its sheer nonsense. It doesn't hurt that he has assembled a cast to die for. Lanky Paul Slade Smith is probably the most complete comic actor of his age group in the area, in both straight plays and musicals. Smith provides Charlie with humanity and intelligence, and you can see the character bloom as attention is paid by the other figures in the story. The remaining six members of the ensemble are all superb, but the attention getter for me was Erin Noel Grennan as Catherine, the hypocritical minister's fiancee and Charlie's eventual love interest. This is my fourth Foreigner, and Grennan is by far the best Catherine, restless, earthy and warm. Remaining performers all play character types, and to perfection. David Lively is Charlie's English mate, Lolly Trauscht is the owner of the resort; Tom Daugherty, a very talented actor and singer who has been in a touring production of Ragtime and has been in Houdini at Marriott, Old Wicked Songs and The Dying Gaul at Apple Tree Theater, is the nasty minister. Derek Hassenstab is Catherine's slow-witted brother, and Daniel Allar is Owen.
They all combine to make The Foreigner seem a much better play than it really is.
