STAGE REVIEW : SPOTLIGHT ON SILLY IN SCR’S ‘THE FOREIGNER’

Runski! Hideski! Every theater has the right to get silly once in a while, but South Coast Repertory is really pushing it with “The Foreigner.”

Now, I admit it. I laughed when the shy Englishman who pretends not to have any English (Jeffrey Alan Chandler) scares off the thug from the Ku Klux Klan (Art Koustik) by further pretending to be Count Dracula. But then I laugh at anybody’s Count Dracula imitation, including my own.

I also could see the joke, in an abstract kind of way, when the lady who runs the inn (Angela Paton) asks the slow-thinking teen-ager for whom she is about to make breakfast (Robert Macnaughton) “How do you like your eggs?” and he looks confused and says “Good.”

But when she asks the kid the same question five minutes later as he starts to eat his eggs, and he answers, “Fried” . . . I mean, talking about reaching for a gag. Dumbski!

Ah, well--it beats “The Unvarnished Truth.” Actually, Larry Shue’s 1984 farce (not 1948, as some of the gags would indicate) has a likable central notion: A fellow who pretends not to understand anything that’s said in his presence may get a real earful--so much that he’s got to get involved with the people around him, shy as he is. And that may crack his shell.

Below that (about one-eighth of an inch) there’s the idea that “personality” isn’t something that we’re born with (or without, as its hero feels applies to him) but something that we acquire from having adventures. So have some! “The Foreigner” may be shameless, but its heart is in the right place--with the little guy.

The idea that Shue’s farce is “beautifully crafted,” however (did the London Times really say this?), is bonkers. The payoff is pretty funny when it comes, but most of the first act is devoted to setting it up, as obviously as a hostess putting chairs out for a party.

For instance, we’re asked to believe that, although his beloved wife is on her deathbed back in London, our nebbishy hero would come to Georgia for three days at the behest of his friend, a British military man who helps the Yanks run military maneuvers nearby (Don Took.)

Further, we’re supposed to believe that when these gabby crackers start spilling all kinds of embarrassing things to him, more or less as they would to the family dog, he doesn’t run in horror to his room, but strings them along, starts to enjoy his role, begins to chatter in foreign gobbledygook and turns out to have the stuff to solve their problems.

Well, maybe, but actor Chandler and director Ron Lagomarsino don’t make us see the moment when Charlie changes inside from shy to bold, and much of “The Foreigner” seems therefore to happen chiefly on the playwright’s say-so. Even for a shaggy dog story, this is a far-fetched one.

Honors, though, to the company for playing it with integrity and for trying not to demean their stereotypes any more than the script does. Koustik, for instance, makes you see the grievance that turns a man into a Klansman (I’m not going to explain how the Klan gets into the plot), and Ann Gillespie makes a remarkably shrewd Southern deb, a gal who has decided to be superficial. Michael Tulin is interesting, too, as a clean-cut young minister who lusteth for power.

Also astute is Robert Blackman’s pickled-pine set, with the walls full of mounted dead things--fish, moose heads. This is a sharp production of a farce that, at its best, isn’t dumb. But, like Edgar Guest, “The Foreigner” isn’t often at its best. South Coast Repertory or South Coast Dinner Theater?