Larry Shue, born in 1946, died in September, 1985 at the age of 39 in an airplane crash. A native of New Orleans, Shue graduated in 1968 from Illinois Wesleyan University where he studied theater, writing and producing two plays in his senior year. Between 1969 and 1972, Shue served in the United States Army. He remained active in theater during his tour of duty, winning the First Army Entertainment Contest in 1970.
Following his discharge from the Army, he began a career as a professional actor with the Harlequin Dinner Theater in Washington, D.C. During his five years in Washington he appeared in almost two dozen shows, specializing in comic roles. In 1977 he moved to the Milwaukee Repertory Theater where he continued his work as an actor and resumed writing plays.
Starting in 1979 the Milwaukee Rep would go on to stage all the plays Larry Shue was to write. “Grandma Duck is Dead,” a one-act farce, appeared in 1979. The Nerd, his first full-length play, was produced in 1981, followed by Wenceslas Square in 1982 and The Foreigner in 1983. All three plays were produced later in New York, with The Nerd and The Foreigner achieving enormous box-office success on and off Broadway, in regional theaters throughout the United States, and in London's West End. At the time of Shue's death, some 68 productions of The Foreigner alone were either running or scheduled to open soon in American theaters.
In fact, Shue was on the verge of major international success as both writer and actor when he died. He was working on a film version of The Foreigner for Disney Productions, and he had been cast in a featured role in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a performance that would have marked his Broadway acting debut. He was to appear in the Hollywood film, Sweet Liberty, and he was negotiating with NBC for a television comedy series.
The popularity of Shue's work rests on its comic appeal to three constants in human experience: the anguish of shyness, the liberating power of disguise, and the pitfalls of language. Of his four plays, three focus on intensely bashful or diffident characters whose lives are transformed through role-playing and make-believe, while two of the four show people struggling hilariously with the challenge of communicating in strange tongues. The Foreigner, Shue's most successful work, combines all three elements.
Shue's fascination with shyness, disguise, and the hazards of language seems to grow directly from his own experience. According to David Richards, "Shue was so unfailingly funny and inventive" as an actor that "people were often surprised to discover how quiet and introverted he could be offstage." "I'm a square," Shue said of himself, "I stammer and stutter a lot. A real klutz, especially when I go out into the world to do a big thing, like buy a hamburger."
If ordering a hamburger was an occasion of anxiety, the idea of taking on a task like directing a play absolutely overwhelmed him. "If an actor told me he didn't want to move left, I'm afraid I'd say, 'That's okay. I'll just move the set right."
His love of acting was based on his desire to escape this inhibited real-life personality by losing himself in the identity of an imaginary human being on stage. By taking on a theatrical role Shue could disguise his timid and ineffectual side while revealing another, equally authentic self: the performer whose power could command the attention and laughter of an audience. If life was frightening for Shue it was precisely because it was unlike the theater: "It's because you can't rehearse it first," he declared.
His interest in language as a vehicle for ludicrous misunderstanding and concealment is likewise rooted in his own experience. Friends of Shue remember his delight in "pulling off . . . double-talk impersonations at parties," where he would pretend to be speaking an alien language to avoid the embarassment of talking to strangers.
Real encounters with real foreigners also reinforced his sense of the waywardness of conversations in translation. In 1974, Shue visited Czechoslovakia, an experience that provided the basis for Wenceslas Square. In several scenes from that play, Shue explores the absurd turns that communication takes when people try to talk to each other across the barrier of language. At one point Vince tries to teach Ladislav an English idiom:
Following his discharge from the Army, he began a career as a professional actor with the Harlequin Dinner Theater in Washington, D.C. During his five years in Washington he appeared in almost two dozen shows, specializing in comic roles. In 1977 he moved to the Milwaukee Repertory Theater where he continued his work as an actor and resumed writing plays.
Starting in 1979 the Milwaukee Rep would go on to stage all the plays Larry Shue was to write. “Grandma Duck is Dead,” a one-act farce, appeared in 1979. The Nerd, his first full-length play, was produced in 1981, followed by Wenceslas Square in 1982 and The Foreigner in 1983. All three plays were produced later in New York, with The Nerd and The Foreigner achieving enormous box-office success on and off Broadway, in regional theaters throughout the United States, and in London's West End. At the time of Shue's death, some 68 productions of The Foreigner alone were either running or scheduled to open soon in American theaters.
In fact, Shue was on the verge of major international success as both writer and actor when he died. He was working on a film version of The Foreigner for Disney Productions, and he had been cast in a featured role in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a performance that would have marked his Broadway acting debut. He was to appear in the Hollywood film, Sweet Liberty, and he was negotiating with NBC for a television comedy series.
The popularity of Shue's work rests on its comic appeal to three constants in human experience: the anguish of shyness, the liberating power of disguise, and the pitfalls of language. Of his four plays, three focus on intensely bashful or diffident characters whose lives are transformed through role-playing and make-believe, while two of the four show people struggling hilariously with the challenge of communicating in strange tongues. The Foreigner, Shue's most successful work, combines all three elements.
Shue's fascination with shyness, disguise, and the hazards of language seems to grow directly from his own experience. According to David Richards, "Shue was so unfailingly funny and inventive" as an actor that "people were often surprised to discover how quiet and introverted he could be offstage." "I'm a square," Shue said of himself, "I stammer and stutter a lot. A real klutz, especially when I go out into the world to do a big thing, like buy a hamburger."
If ordering a hamburger was an occasion of anxiety, the idea of taking on a task like directing a play absolutely overwhelmed him. "If an actor told me he didn't want to move left, I'm afraid I'd say, 'That's okay. I'll just move the set right."
His love of acting was based on his desire to escape this inhibited real-life personality by losing himself in the identity of an imaginary human being on stage. By taking on a theatrical role Shue could disguise his timid and ineffectual side while revealing another, equally authentic self: the performer whose power could command the attention and laughter of an audience. If life was frightening for Shue it was precisely because it was unlike the theater: "It's because you can't rehearse it first," he declared.
His interest in language as a vehicle for ludicrous misunderstanding and concealment is likewise rooted in his own experience. Friends of Shue remember his delight in "pulling off . . . double-talk impersonations at parties," where he would pretend to be speaking an alien language to avoid the embarassment of talking to strangers.
Real encounters with real foreigners also reinforced his sense of the waywardness of conversations in translation. In 1974, Shue visited Czechoslovakia, an experience that provided the basis for Wenceslas Square. In several scenes from that play, Shue explores the absurd turns that communication takes when people try to talk to each other across the barrier of language. At one point Vince tries to teach Ladislav an English idiom:
LADISLAV. English--my English--has grown--down.
VINCE. We'd say, "My English is rusty." . . . . . . . . . .
LADISLAV. (With dictionary. . . . Reading.) Rusty--"brown from oxidation" . . . . (Smiling) My English is brown from oxidation. . . . Good. Now--shall we eat the beer?
The humor in such moments arises from the contrast between the speaker's earnest assumption that he is saying something coherent and the surreal wrongness of the words--a situation that recurs frequently in Shue's plays.
The pain of stilted conversation, the sufferings of the bashful, the alchemical power of impersonation all combine to make The Foreigner the clearest embodiment of Shue's modest theory of dramatic composition: "I write plays out of embarrassment. . . . I generally write them either about my personal experiences, or I find an interesting character and try to fill in the world around him." Or both, as is the case in this play.
The pain of stilted conversation, the sufferings of the bashful, the alchemical power of impersonation all combine to make The Foreigner the clearest embodiment of Shue's modest theory of dramatic composition: "I write plays out of embarrassment. . . . I generally write them either about my personal experiences, or I find an interesting character and try to fill in the world around him." Or both, as is the case in this play.