The Ladies Foursome: A Bit of Sunshine at the Roxy
Richard-Yves Sitoski shares his review of a new OSLT production and leaves audiences with a question to ponder.
COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTION
Norm Foster plays are always a hit, and with good reason. They’re warm in tone, and their humour is gentle, coming not so much from farcical situations as from an amused exploration of contemporary foibles we can all identify with. The OSLT’s production of The Ladies Foursome, on at the Roxy February 8-11 and 14-17, is no exception.
The 2014 play is a female follow-up to Foster’s 1998 The Foursome, which follows four men who reunite for their college reunion. This time, three women – Margot, Tate, and Connie – get together for a round of golf following the funeral of their partner Cathy, and are joined by Cathy’s friend Dory, whom none of them have met.
What ensues is two hours of levity as they explore the ups and downs of sex, marriage, children, jobs, aging and much more. This is emphatically not a plot-driven play, but a chance for four very different women to explore the vagaries of middle age in what is ultimately an exploration of the bonds of friendship.
The actors hit play off one another delightfully, and hit the right note for each character: Donna Fisher-Potter has the right gloss and shimmer to portray the fun-loving newscaster Connie, Jane Phillips does a great job slowly revealing the insecurities of stay-at-home wife Tate, Sandy LeMaitre’s Margot is fully sympathetic as the single woman working extra hard to assert herself in a traditionally male occupation, and Shirley Holmes gets some great lines as Dory, whose outward calm belies some simmering inner conflicts.
To say any more would reveal too much. Secrets are told, self-doubts are confessed, deep-seated resentments surface, and ultimately friendship is affirmed. I must confess I am partial to this type of character study. Foster has an unerring ear for dialogue, delivering exposition in the most natural way, such that the conversations in The Ladies Foursome are exactly what you would expect from people in their situation. One can easily imagine oneself as part of the gang.
The timing of this show is spot-on: according to director Bill Murphy, February seemed like a great time to put on a comedy, and I heartily agree. It seems this past January lasted several months and we are due some relief from the unremitting overcast. What could be more summery than a comedy set on a golf course?
And it’s quite a comedy, clocking in at over two hours. This length brings with it a host of challenges, but furnishes many opportunities.
One of the keys to successful comedy is pacing. The play is divided into 18 mini-scenes, one for each hole on the course, and each scenelet opens with a joke and then deepens as the protagonists address their issues, and find these issues interweaving.
This means that Murphy and the actors had to carefully negotiate the pace, and also had to worry about the dialogue, which is full of short reaction lines – what? oh, really? – which provide necessary beats to deliver proper repartee and set up the serious parts. The tendency to go off-book was difficult to counter.
Thus, much time was spent in discussion between the director and the actors, as Murphy had everyone weigh their interpretations against Foster’s objectives. As Murphy tells me, the fact that all four actors are very experienced helped the task and made it enjoyable.
One production issue that bears noting is how the limited set conveys 18 different golf holes with no repeats of the staging. The stagehands have their work cut out for them, reorganizing the sets 18 times in the course of the play, and their workspace must be a mess of spike tape (the tape lines which mark off where sets and props are located).
What’s more, staging and blocking had to be done in such a way that the actors don’t hit one another with their clubs during the backswing! (Murphy assures me that the audience is not at risk of a flying club, though it did happen once in rehearsal that one of the actors lost control of her club and it landed in the seats!)
(As an aside, local golf aficionados will recognize Legacy Ridge in the projected backdrops, though from the unusual vantage point of looking backward from the tee boxes.)
One aspect of the play which ought to be celebrated is that it provides four meaty roles for female actors over the age of 35. It is deplorable that comparatively few vehicles focus on women actors in lead roles, let alone actors in middle age. The OSLT is fortunate in having in its roster so many talented actors of all ages, such that every character in The Ladies Foursome can be portrayed by someone who can really run with the role.
That said, I’ll leave you with a little question to ponder after the show: how would the play have differed if it had been written by a woman?
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