'The Foreigner' Is Weak No Matter How Strong The Cast

'The Foreigner' is weak no matter how strong the cast

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

Five years ago I sat in the Birmingham Theatre watching Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” listening to a roaring audience and wondering to myself, “Why are these people laughing?”

Experiencing Shue’s much-beloved comedy again Wednesday night at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, I found myself almost guiltily asking the same question. Five years back, I could at least sympathize with Birmingham for being saddled with the shameless mugging of hambone star Artie Johnson. Yet here was Chris Korow delivering a beautifully modulated comic turn in Ann Arbor Civic Theatre's “Foreigner,” and the play still seemed embarrassingly sophomoric and dull.

Clearly an airtight formula for comedy will never exist, leaving each of us to guffaw or not guffaw at whatever tickles or numbs our respective funnybones. I happen to find The Three Stooges about as funny as toxic waste, and I dive for the silencer button whenever Andy Rooney comes on “60 Minutes.” Thus I’ve no hard feelings toward Wednesday night’s audience, most of whom whooped and laughed at Shue’s threadbare tale of ultra-shy Britisher Charlie Baker (Korow), who finds himself ensconsed in a backwoods Georgia lodge while his (unfaithful) wife recuperates in an Atlanta hospital.

“I’m boring,” confesses Charlie to ex-army mate Froggy (Tim Morley), who's driven him to the lodge. “How does one acquire a personality?” laments our balding, bow-tied nebbish of a hero, who’s spent his life as a science fiction proofreader, and boasts a near-pathological fear of conversing with others.

Sympathizing with Charlie’s wish to be left alone, Froggy hits on an inspiration: pretend you’re a foreign visitor possessing naiy a shred of English, and you won’t have to talk. Predictably, the ruse produces unpredictable consequences: our hidebound rural Georgians (ranging from benign crackers to an upper-class ex-debutante to vicious Ku Klux Manners) are so entranced by the presence of an “exotic” foreigner in their midst that they do anything but leave him at peace.

A reluctant celebrity, poor Charlie (as an audience member dubbed him during intermission) slowly undergoes a metamorphosis: being forced to pretend he’s another person frees him from his own cringing self. Soon our liberated hero’s dancing a quasi-Egyptian jig, spiritedly telling his entranced lodgers a story in pigeon English (“Ugly and nastika," “marsedotes and doesedotes”), even foiling the KKK via the magic words, “Matu! Barada! Nikto!” (Being a sci-fi proofreader can come in handy).

It’s clear Charlie makes not only himself but those around him better people - including snooty ex-debu-tante Catherine Simms (Kathleen Davies) who proves not so snooty after all, and half-wit brother Ellard (Fred Bock) who proves not such a dim bulb thanks to Charlie’s caterpillar-to-butterfly benificence.

All this secular bom-againism might be touching were “The Foreigner” not so bogged down in cheap-laugh nonsense-word silliness (sorry, there’s only one Lewis Carroll).

Another problem is the glacial pace of Civic director Conrad Mason’s staging. “The Foreigner" checks in at a solid three hours, a ludicrously long stretch for material this thin. I suspect a good half hour could be eliminated simply through swifter line reading, though the show does work up a few droll schticks: a mirror-image breakfast ritual between Charlie and Ellard recalls the Marx Brothers' “Duck Soup,” while a juicy homage to “The Wizard of Oz” near show’s end is played to shamanist perfection.

Korow’s sweet, gangly Charlie leads a stellar cast. Director-turned-actress Jan Koengeter makes Betty a fussbudget earth mother, while Thom Johnson combines stupidity with genuine menace as a scuzzy Klansman. Kathleen Davies makes Catherine almost more soulful than she deserves, while Fred Bock, a gifted actor whose five-minute turn in Civic’s recent “Oliver!” was the best performance in the show, is a most bizarre Ellard - less a standard dumb lunk than Nijinsky playing Petrushka, both in his doll’s makeup and herky-jerky movements. I’m not sure what concept was involved here, but it’s certainly unforgettable.

I just wish these talented folks had better material to work with, but then again I’m clearly in the minority when it comes to “The Foreigner." I may have squirmed last evening, but most folks seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves. So call me a curmudgeon and come have some laughs, OK? Maybe one of these Sundays I’ll even give Andy Rooney another try.

"The Foreigner" runs through Saturday at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. For information call 763-1085.