Playing foreign America's classic farce at PSC BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	The Foreigner By Larry Shue. Directed by Lisa DiFranza. Produced by Portland Stage Company, through February 20. Call (207) 774–0465.
	Backstage • There’s more to a cabaret than Liza Minnelli, thank God, and here are two good ones for the weekend: Up in Brunswick, the Theater Project transforms itself into a candle-lit café, replete with table service and reckless desserts, as its Ensemble performs light SNL-style skits by Christopher Durang and David Ives. A source assures me that the show delivers both verbal wit and huge fake breasts. Plus: This event is both Pay-What-You-Want and BYOB! You can afford that. Call (207) 729-8584. And after this Friday’s Art Walk, take the walk to the busy Company of Girls space on Mayo for the Casco Bay Cabaret and Cheap Art Sale #4. There the People’s Free Space presents a benefit evening of local and far-flung puppeteers, political theater, jugglers, and comics, all for a suggested donation of $0 to $5. You can afford that, too. Call (207) 879-2699. • Hey, local actors: Ever get the feeling that you’re playing in a cover band? Hankering for some fresh material? Well, rustle up that audition monologue and head over to the St. Lawrence on February 12 to try out for roles in the Maine Short Play Festival, a showcase of entirely new and locally written one-acts. Call (207) 772-9640 to make an appointment.

Don’t tell me you’ve never played dumb. Maybe it’s not your proudest defense against threats or irritations, but we all do it. It sometimes even works. But as Portland Stage Company’s current production (The Foreigner, directed by Lisa DiFranza) demonstrates, playing dumb has nothing on playing foreign.

Charlie (Mark Honan) could be the poster boy for those "social anxiety" pills with all the dire side effects that they sell on TV. Shrinking and awkward, his wife is both ailing and unfaithful back in England, so his robust army buddy Froggy (Andrew Harris) checks him into a fishing lodge somewhere out in backwoods Georgia for a vacation. Charlie could use the break, but can’t stomach the hassle of actually talking to anyone, so Froggy tells the sweet old proprietress Betty (Moira Driscoll) that Charlie is from a nation far, far away, and doesn’t speak a word of English — not even, as the credulous Betty notes, "when it’s real loud." Charlie is in a position, therefore, to hear and understand many more secrets than the lodge’s other guests — spoiled debutante heiress Catherine (Jenn Thompson), her fiancé, the Reverend David Lee (James Noel Hoban), and her (possibly) half-wit brother Ellard (Rufus Tureen) — ever suspect. What follows is in Larry Shue’s inventive romp, a well-executed comic treatment of presumption and redneck prejudice.

As Charlie sits goggle-eyed in an armchair babbling faux-foreign nonsense, he inadvertently becomes both a litmus and a tabula rasa for the other characters, who project, confess, and disavail themselves of their woes as they never would to anyone they thought could actually understand them. At first, Honan’s Charlie takes it all in as if watching from within a fish bowl, alternately peering out and trying to sink from view, and the others likewise approach him as if he were an exotic fish they sometimes enjoy tapping at and other times forget about entirely. But Charlie’s foreign and ingenuous persona — however disingenuously obtained — acts as a catalyst on the others in spite of himself, and before long there’s a lot more communication going on. With deft physical pacing, PSC’s cast makes this rapprochement convincing, comically fraught, and progressively entertaining to watch.

Apace with the accelerating comedy, a process of humanization sets to work on the assembled stereotypes, and in Thompson’s Catherine and Tureen’s Ellard this process is particularly winning. Bitchy, frustrated Catherine could easily be plain insufferable, but Thompson gives her great dimension without belaboring it. We understand her frequent irritation as having its real source in her dissatisfaction with herself, and her character’s evolution rings pleasingly true.

Her brother Ellard — in Portland-native Tureen’s hands, just about the most forthright, endearing backwater kid in a Yoda T-shirt you could hope to meet — actually has a lot in common with Charlie. As the two characters whose understanding of their environment is most disparaged, they’re psychic twins of a sort, and the scene that actualizes this relationship is one of the funniest and most resounding of the play: After cautiously appraising each other at the breakfast table, Ellard and Charlie begin imitating each other’s fumbling of the silverware until they’re entrenched in a full-blown bout of the mirror game, hopping around the room in perfect symmetry with juice glasses held to their heads. The humor and communion they find in such simple, dumb fun marks this as a turning point for their characters — after which both are more willing to trust each other and themselves — and is quite contagious for us in the audience, too.

The malevolent and xenophobic characters are more cartoonishly sketched, which saps some of the play’s paean-to-tolerance impact, despite the program notes’ reference to such sinister cultural ambiguities as the PATRIOT Act. But the play isn’t meant to be too heavy, anyway, and instead PSC delights with excellent verbal timing and on-the-mark physical shenanigans. In the tradition of comedy, The Foreigner celebrates wisdom gleaned from nonsense, redemption from strife, and commonality from the most unlikely — or unwilling — of sources.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com