The Foreigner

The Foreigner, by Larry Shue, is a great American comedy, a funny and engaging piece of theatre. This play has everything: great comic dialogue and situation, suspense, romance, surprise turns of plot, all driven by the interplay of seven wonderfully drawn characters, characters that unfold into something different from what we first think they are. 

Froggy Lesueur is a wry Cockney soldier and good friend to Charlie Baker (The “Foreigner”), a timid, bland British proofreader whose wife, it seems, is continually cheating on him with somebody exciting. As the play opens, Froggy is dropping Charlie off for a brief holiday at a lodge in rural Georgia which his old friend Betty Meeks is vainly trying to keep up since her husband’s death. 

Staying at the lodge are Catherine Simms, a spoiled (at first take) ex-debutante and her dim-witted (ditto) brother Ellard. Catherine is engaged to The Rev. David Marshall Lee, a really (we think) sweet guy with a big heart. Hanging tight to the Reverend is Owen Musser, a good ol’ bottom-feeder, whom we initially mistake for harmless. Early in his stay, Charlie overhears some things he shouldn’t and decides he’d better feign an ignorance of the English language for his own good. And it is this wonderful device — where we (and Froggy) are in on Charlie’s secret but nobody else is — that fuels the non-stop hilarity of the play and sets up the startling change of fortunes when things go uproariously awry for the “bad guys” and the “good guys” emerge triumphant.