Thursday, January 24, 2008

Article in the Go Triad

From bayou to off-Broadway
By Leslie Mizell, Special to Go Triad
WINSTON-SALEM -- It's a long way from Louisiana to New York, but two bayou playwrights with shows opening in Winston-Salem next week found success there at a very early age.

The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem is staging Larry Shue's "The Foreigner," a modern-day classic comedy, opening Feb. 1. That same night, the Stained Glass Playhouse will debut Judi Ann Mason's "Livin' Fat" for Piedmont audiences.

Actor-playwright Shue, a New Orleans native, debuted "My Emperor's New Clothes" off-Broadway in 1968 when he was just 22 years old. However, he wouldn't find real accolades until nearly 15 years later when he wrote a pair of comedies, "The Nerd" and "The Foreigner," as a playwright in residence at Milwaukee Repertory Theater .

"The Nerd" premiered in London in 1981 and had a successful Broadway run in 1987; "The Foreigner" spent 18 months off-Broadway and won the Outer Critics Circle award for best play.

"The Foreigner" of the title is Charlie Baker, a painfully shy Englishman who is vacationing with his friend "Froggy" LaSeur at a Georgia hunting lodge when soldier Froggy is unexpectedly called up for maneuvers.

Stranded with a bunch of strangers, Charlie pretends to be a foreigner who doesn't understand English. But far from isolating him from the lodge owners and guests, his inability to communicate means he finds himself taken into their confidences and becomes the unwitting witness to their secrets.
One secret becomes particularly volatile, and Charlie suddenly finds himself helping his new friends protect themselves from the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Sadly, "Wenceslas Square " (1988) would be Shue's fifth and final produced comedy. The playwright died in a plane crash in 1985. He was 39.

Mason was born 10 years after Shue in Shreveport, La. Her writing career was off to an auspicious start when she received the Norman Lear Award for Comedy from the Kennedy Center while a student at Grambling State University.

Like Shue, she first found professional success at 22, selling a script to the long-running TV comedy "Good Times" in 1978. Since then, she has worked as easily in comedy as drama, and for television, stage and movies alike.

She also wrote scripts for "Sanford and Son," "A Different World," "Beverly Hills, 90210," and "I'll Fly Away."

She penned films "Sophie & the Moonhanger" for television and the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit" for the silver screen. In between, she found time to write three dozen plays and youth musicals, including "Eddie Lee Baker Is Dead" and "A Star Ain't Nothin' But a Hole in Heaven."

"Livin' Fat," which the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company debuted off-Broadway in 1976, is set in that recession-ridden era. Times are tough for the Cooper family. Although money is tight, their affection for each other is limitless.

Everything changes, however, when son David Lee, a college graduate forced by the economy to work as a bank janitor, interrupts a robbery. In their haste to get away, the thieves drop a $50,000 bundle of money, which David Lee grabs and hides from his employers and the police.

Now the religious and law-abiding Coopers are faced with a dilemma: The money would allow David Lee's father to quit one of his jobs, his mother to stop cleaning other people's houses, his grandmother to enjoy her golden years, his sister to go to college, and himself to get a fresh start and marry his girlfriend. But can they sacrifice their scruples enough to benefit from ill-gotten gains?

Contact Leslie Mizell at LAMizell@aol.com

No comments: