‘THE FOREIGNER’ AND A DIRECTOR COME WEST

When a man is reminded that his wife has been unfaithful to him with 23 different people and he replies, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,” you know you’re dealing with a peculiar man. Such is the case with Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” which has its West Coast premiere Tuesday night at South Coast Repertory.

Infidelity is not the subject of “The Foreigner,” who is an Englishman named Charley introduced by his friend Froggy, a demolitions expert, into a rural Georgia setting. Charley’s extreme delicacy of character would be more to the point. It has proven so rare and fetching that the play has enjoyed a zesty run on Off Broadway since 1984, giving proof of Shue’s considerable talent--lamentably cut short by a fatal plane crash in September last year.

The task of staging it here belongs to 34-year-old Ron Lagomarsino, who’s also making his local directorial debut.

“It’s got two things I respond to,” Lagomarsino said of the play. “It has a childlike quality that borders on silliness at times, but it has incredible heart: One of its themes is folks helping folks. It has pain. A young man named Ellard is given up for being a backward guy. He fears taking a step because he feels he’s useless. Charley makes him feel that that isn’t so. It sounds sentimental, but the play has elements of farce. It’s able to change in tone from comedy to danger.”

South Coast Repertory hired Lagomarsino on his strength as a comedy director. “He’s able to find the meat and bones of comedy, and humor in character, as opposed to making kinetic choices just for effect,” said SCR artistic co-director David Emmes. Lagomarsino acknowledges that over a varied career, comedy has offered him his greatest challenges.

“I directed Joanne Woodward and Judith Ivey in ‘Hay Fever’ at the Kenyon Festival of Theater,” he said. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. It was my first Noel Coward. It can come off so brittle and effete that it’s meaningless, or it can be a very funny play about eccentric but real people. Getting the demands of high comedy rooted in reality is hard. People’s minds move at high speed. There’s got to be a human core in anything in the theater. Anything worth doing has to be done out of human behavior that’s real.”

Lagomarsino--of medium height with dark-blue eyes, dark curly hair and a New York pallor (he grew up in San Francisco, another palely lit city)--looks somewhat like an ethereal John McEnroe. His face is narrower, but he has a similar long, prideful neck and delicately shaped head.

“I went to St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco--I was a cheerleader, which helped me a lot later when I played in ‘Vanities’ in New York--and acting seemed like so much fun that I didn’t want to do anything else. I worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and in fact my first exposure to ‘The Foreigner’ was when I understudied Anthony Heald, who was in the original cast. I scouted him to do another play I was directing.”

Lagomarsino would have to be considered an actor’s director, not only because he’s acted so much himself but because his ambivalence about acting makes him more sensitive to the performer’s struggle.

“Acting is terrifying--there’s so little control, no matter where you are in your career. You could work steadily and successfully right up into your 60s, yet you have to prove yourself over and over again.” Still, “the scientific, psychological aspect of directing I find endlessly fascinating, so much so that it leads me to want to try acting again.”

One of Lagomarsino’s early discoveries about how to put a play over came when he was working toward his master’s degree in theater under Mel Shapiro at New York University.

“I first met him when I did a turgid little scene--at least it was turgid the way we performed it--in Tennessee Williams’ ‘Outcry.’ Shapiro always told us, ‘You have to set the tone in the first few minutes.’

“One of the easiest things to mess up is style, which I define as the given reality of any play. There’s a world everything on stage lives in, from character to choice of music, costumes and lighting. It’s very important that everything in the play refer to the same world. There’s room for incongruity, contradictions and inconsistency as long as they all work in the framework of that world. Even the most unsophisticated audience member can sniff out fakery.”

Lagomarsino has written a couple of docudramas, and when leaner times prevailed in 1980, he worked for two years directing soaps. His knowledge and instincts have served him well. He’s worked at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, won a National Endowment for the Arts directors grant (which took him to the Hartford Stage Company), and on the strength of his reputation and ideas was hired by Zelda Fichandler (he directed Ron Ribman’s “Cold Storage” at the Arena Stage) and by David Emmes. Neither had seen his work.

“ ‘The Foreigner’ is a very old-fashioned play,” Lagomarsino said. “It’s crafted like a comedy from the time when there was a real situation with good guys and bad guys and a plot--and a happy ending, of course. We’re in a period dominated by plotless plays right now, which makes this one difficult to do. I’d like to see language make a comeback, as well as structure and form, which people reacted against once those elements became predictable. It’s too easy to spill your guts out on stage.”

Lagomarsino seems no fan of the expedient. “I get very annoyed with young actors who want success and fame immediately without paying their dues, though I know it’s hard when you see People magazine tell us who this week’s major star is. It’s annoying to hear someone like Kristy McNichol pooh-pooh training. Performance is an elusive thing. I don’t even like to see stage directions in a published script--every production is different.

“I like it best when someone comes up to me and asks, ‘How did you come by that bit of business?’ and I don’t know if it was me or an actor who thought of it. Ninety percent of success in anything is casting. I understudied Anthony Heald in ‘The Nutcracker’ at the Hartford Stage. Every night he’d do a bit of business with Sada Thompson that got a huge laugh. When I went on, nothing--the setup was wrong; we were different people. I don’t care for the director-as-dictator school. Ultimately what I say goes, but the actor should be able to feel that anything can be tried. I’m suspicious of people who have all the answers.”

After “The Foreigner” gets on its feet, Lagomarsino will return to New York to direct a new Off Broadway play, “The Traveling Squirrel.”

“The title will be changed, of course. It’s a wicked comedy about show business and New York, the ruthlessness of it.”

Implicit in his remarks was the idea that life in the theater is never without peril, inside or out. A happy ending has to have an added appeal for being so rare these days.