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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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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. See more about him here.
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. 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. |
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SETTING.
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The Foreigner takes place in "what was once the living-room of a log farmhouse, now adapted for service as a parlor for paying guests." That parlor now forms the main public room of "Betty Meeks' Fishing Lodge Resort, Tilghman County, Georgia." The rural southern setting is important because it plausibly provides a gullible group of characters who have rarely, if ever, met a real foreigner. Thus the make-believe foreigner of the title has an easier time carrying off his deception than he would in a more cosmopolitan locale. Not only are the parochial inhabitants of this rustic county easily fooled by the impostor, but the novelty of his presence arouses extreme reactions among them. Some, like Betty Meeks, are fascinated by his strange customs; others, like Owen Musser, hate and resent him for being un-American.
The southern setting is important also in understanding this latter response. The anger against the foreigner is expressed mainly by a group of characters who belong to the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose intolerant ideas about race, religion, and nationality, are often associated with the rural south. As the play develops, the confrontation between these Klansmen and the other characters becomes the main focus of the action. Finally, the setting is significant because the lodge itself is the source of conflict between Betty Meeks, its owner, and Owen Musser, property inspector for the county and secret agent of the Klan. Musser is seeking to condemn the building, forcing Betty to sell it at a low price to the Rev. David Lee, yet another Klansman. Once David gets possession of the property, he will convert it into the headquarters for the Klan's Georgia Empire. |
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THE PLOT.
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The action begins with the arrival at the Meeks lodge of two Englishmen, Froggy LeSueur, a member of the British Army, and his old friend, Charlie Baker. Froggy frequently visits the lodge when he is in Georgia on military business. This time, he has brought Charlie along to provide his friend with a much needed escape from a miserable life. Charlie's wife is hospitalized, apparently terminally ill, and Charlie himself feels useless and rejected. "Mary doesn't like me," he says about his wife, "That's why she wanted me to go away, you see. She simply finds me shatteringly, profoundly--boring."
Charlie is a man who wonders how "one acquire[s] personality," and what it would be like "to be able to tell a funny story. . . . To arouse laughter. Anger. Respect." He describes himself as man who has an "active fear of . . . talk," one who is terrified by simply "knowing that in another moment, it's going to be my turn" to take part in a conversation. As a result of Charlie's social paralysis, his wife has turned to other men for companionship--twenty-three of them, as it turns out—thus deepening his sense of personal insignificance. When Charlie learns that he is not the only guest at the lodge, and that in fact there will be several other people present with whom he will unavoidably have to converse, he is panic-stricken and begs Froggy to let him escape. Froggy, however, devises a ruse that will allow Charlie to enjoy his visit to Georgia: he tells the innkeeper, Betty Meeks, that his friend is a foreigner who speaks no English. Thus, Froggy explains, any attempt at conversation with Charlie will be pointless. As a result, the man who is terrified of talk will be free to remain silent. Charlie soon discovers that his reputation as a foreigner confers on him a kind of social invisibility. Because they assume Charlie cannot understand English, people say things in front of him that they would otherwise conceal. In this way Charlie learns that Catherine, Rev. David's fiance, is already pregnant--a scandalous situation for the future wife of a clergyman. He further learns that David is not what he seems. His deceived fiance sees him as, "so sweet, and he does for people, and he's so patient." In reality, David is plotting with Owen Musser to have the lodge condemned so that he can buy it cheaply after he marries Catherine and gains access to her inheritance. David and Owen will then transform the lodge into a "Christian hunt club"--a code phrase meaning a Ku Klux Klan resort. And Charlie also discovers that David is systematically scheming to convince Catherine that her younger brother, Ellard, is mentally incompetent, thereby assuring that the boy will not receive his share of his father's legacy, all of which will instead go to Catherine, and thus ultimately to David and the Klan. We see, then, that Charlie is not the only deceiver in this cast of characters. David is no less an impostor, playing the role of virtuous Christian, but practicing greed, cruelty, and intolerance. Charlie also learns something about himself in this process of discovery. "I think I'm acquiring a personality," he declares to Froggy, expressing a newfound sense of identity and power conferred by his role as all-knowing, exotic foreigner. Equipped with information and self-confidence, Charlie begins systematically to undermine David's plans for acquiring the lodge and discrediting Ellard. First, Charlie involves Ellard in teaching him English. Naturally, the lessons are astonishingly effective, and Ellard's success as a teacher begins to bolster his own and his sister's respect for his abilities. And the smarter Ellard seems, the less likelihood there is of David stealing his inheritance. Not only does Charlie convince Ellard that he is a virtuoso teacher, he also encourages the boy to learn the craft of bricklaying--an especially useful skill in upsetting David's plans, since the lodge is to be condemned because of some faulty brickwork. If Ellard can learn to fix the problem, Betty Musser's property will be saved from the Klan. While bolstering Ellard's image, Charlie mounts a direct attack on the dignity and authority of David and Owen. He sets up a spontaneous language lesson in which he purports to teach everyone his imaginary native tongue. As Charlie manipulates the event, Ellard, Catherine, and Betty seem to be star pupils, while Owen and David are made to look foolish and stupid. CHARLIE. I teach now. (Motioning them all to join.) All. . . . All say. "Gok. Blit." For the ferociously macho Owen, that is an intolerable insult, and it leads him to storm out of the house vowing vengeance against Charlie and his friends.
This threat precipitates the climax of the action. Owen returns with his hooded Klan associates, but in the meantime Charlie and the others have devised a plan to outwit and repel their attack. Charlie, who has previously planted a seed of fear in Owen by seeming to exhibit uncanny powers, stages a scene before the invaders in which by magic he seemingly reduces a hooded klansman to a pile of ashes and a sheet. Terrified, Owen and his confederates flee the lodge. Following this triumph, the play rushes to a comprehensively happy ending. David is revealed as a Klansman and schemer, which leads to the breaking of his engagement to Catharine. The lodge is saved from its predators, and Catharine promises Betty that she and Ellard will join her in an effort to renew its life as a successful inn. Froggy rushes in with the happy news that Mary, Charlie's wife, is not in fact dying, but has instead run off with her twenty-fourth lover. And finally, Catherine confirms what we have been sensing throughout the play, namely that she has lost her heart to the foreigner, who is only too happy to accept her offer of long-term lessons in English. |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Generally speaking, the most important character in any play is the one who changes most from the beginning to the end. In The Foreigner it is Charlie who fits this description. As we have seen, he begins as a man paralyzed by a sense of his own personal vacuity, despised by his wife, and terrified of meeting and talking to strangers. In the course of the action, he becomes the opposite of this early self. He ends the play completely in command of his world, a figure of uncanny power, capable of routing evil enemies and winning the love of a rich and beautiful young woman. As he tells Froggy before his grand victory over the Klan, "what an adventure I've been having! . . . We--all of us, we're becoming--we're making one another complete, and alive. . . . Thank you for making me a foreigner." Charlie thus becomes most completely fulfilled, most intoxicatingly himself, by escaping into a new identity--much as his creator found fulfillment onstage as a comic actor.
The other characters reflect and refract Charlie's experience in various ways. Like Charlie, David is an impostor. But whereas Charlie uses his disguise to help others, David's hypocrisy is self-serving and destructive. As a secret agent of the Klan, David is ultimately committed to imposing constraints and limitations on others, to denying their humanity. By contrast, Charlie helps others, like Ellard, to realize previously undiscovered human talents. In one sense, the action of the play can be seen as the benign imposter, Charlie, rescuing the other characters from the evil influence of the malicious imposter, David. Like Charlie before he becomes The Foreigner, Ellard thinks little of himself at the beginning of the play, having been convinced by others--mainly David--that he is witless, possibly even retarded. He seems incapable of carrying out the simplest task, his presence a useless burden in the house. And just as Charlie becomes different by being treated differently, so Ellard is transformed when others begin to see him in a new light. Led to believe that he has successfully taught the foreigner to speak and read English, he becomes more self-confident about all his abilities, finally participating as a resourceful partner--rather than as a lame-brained obstacle--in the plan to rout the Klan. Catharine, too, has fallen under David's evil influence. Convinced that her fiance is a paragon of moral excellence, she feels, as she says, "vile most of the time" in comparison to him. Next to his apparently virtuous life, her existence seems "selfish and silly. . . . Dressin' up, flouncin' around . . . sippin' at drinks in revolvin' restaurants. Dumb, dumb, stupid, useless, mindless. . . ." As with Ellard, David's impact on Catherine is to make her feel insignificant. And as with Ellard, it is Charlie as the foreigner who provides her with an opportunity to realize her true value. She too participates in the battle against the Klan, she discovers David's hollowness, and she finally understands that her true feelings lie with the intriguing outsider. Owen Musser is unlike David and Charlie in that he makes little effort to conceal his real identity. He is a bigot and proud of it. And unlike Charlie, Ellard, and Catherine, he feels no dissatisfaction with his life, no desire to change or grow. Owen at the end of the play is essentially the same self-satisfied, narrow-minded character that he was at the beginning. |
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THEMES.
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The play explores the power of disguise, both for good and evil. David employs his skills as a dissimulator to manipulate people for his own selfish purposes, to undermine their feelings of worth or importance. In his hands, the human power to pretend becomes the diabolical power to lie, and thus to deplete and diminish the human soul.
By contrast, Charlie exemplifies the affirmative power of the imagination, its ability to awaken utterly unpredictable and creative responses in people such as Ellard. Like art, Charlie's performance brings more life into a world that was in danger of being sucked dry by imagination's evil twin, deceit. For Larry Shue, described by one fellow artist as a man who took "joy in being on stage," the power of art was a kind of paradox: a performance that reveals the truth. "He was starting to write about matters he felt deeply about," said the artistic director of the Milwaukee Rep. "He once told me that one of the things that gave him pleasure in The Foreigner was that he could make it turn out all right for the good guys. In his plays he had begun to level his wit against everything that made him angry--pomposity and self importance . . . cruelty, intolerance, and prejudice. He was too gentle to do that in real life." Thus, the author does through this play what Charlie does through his performance as the foreigner: he uses the power of imagination to make things come out right. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. Have you ever hidden behind a disguise to escape from social embarrassment?
2. What kinds of disguises do people use to protect themselves? 3. Why would Catherine have fallen in love with David? 4. Why are the people at the inn so fascinated by the presence of a foreigner? 5. Why is Owen Musser so hostile toward the foreigner? 6. Why does Charlie change so radically by the end of the play? 7. To what extent is your idea of yourself determined by others? 8. To what extent do you form your own identity independently of other people's ideas about you? 9. Have you ever changed in response to other people's perceptions of you? 10. Have you ever been a foreigner? What impact did it have on your behavior? |