'Foreigner,' 2 experimental productions open
Pioneer Theatre Company stages insightful comedy
• THE FOREIGNER, Larry Shue's insightful 1983 comedy set in a rural Georgia fishing lodge, will play Friday through Dec. 22 on the Lees Main Stage of Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre, 300 S. 1400 East.
Betty Meeks' Fishing Lodge is a relatively laid-back little place, until the weekend that Staff Sgt. "Froggy" LeSueur shows up with his friend, Charlie Baker, in tow.
Charlie, who is pathologically shy and terrified at the mere thought of striking up conversations with strangers, is stunned when Froggy has to leave him at the lodge for three days surrounded by people he's never met.
But Froggy fixes things up so that Meeks, her guests and others think that Charlie is from a foreign country and can neither speak nor understand English. Suddenly, he becomes a fly on the wall, privy to everyone's secrets.
"The Foreigner" is directed by artistic director Charles Morey, assisted by Anne Stewart Mark. The production was originally scheduled to be directed by guest artist Howard Millman, but during the first week of rehearsals he returned home for medical reasons.
Mark said she had seen the show before — when it was staged as part of the fall season at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in 2005, "but I had never read it until now. The cast was much more familiar (with the script) than Chuck and I were."
One familiar name to local theatergoers is Max Robinson, who's performed in dozens of PTC shows with Mark. He's playing Froggy LeSueur, the exuberant military sergeant and the central character's closest friend.
Others in the cast are Jim Wisniewski in the title role as "Foreigner" Charlie Baker; Darrie Lawrence, seen in PTC's "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," as Betty Meeks; Lauren Elise McCord as Catherine Simms, a lodger who pours her soul out to Charlie (thinking, of course, that he doesn't understand a thing she's saying); Michael Daniel Anderson as Ellard, her somewhat slow-witted younger brother; Christopher Kelly as the Rev. David Marshall Lee, Catherine's fiance; and Jeremy Holm as the menacing Owen Musser.
"Wisniewski has a tough role. So much of what Charlie Baker does is silent, but he gains a personality — which is what he wants to do — and transforms himself by the end of the play," said Mark. "We get to watch him become a whole person as he allows these others to open up."
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