Playwright husband and actress wife take the controls of delightful, clever vehicle

Friday June 21, 2002

HARRY CURRIE RECORD STAFF

Norm Foster's plays both amaze and entertain every time I see them. Here On The Flight Path, which opened at Theatre on the Grand in Fergus on Wednesday, is now one of the Foster staples, and is even more delightful when it stars Foster and his real-life wife, Janet Monid, in the two-actor show. Foster's trademark is his keen observation of people, their faults and foibles, and his ability to find the delicious humour in all of it. Here On The Flight Path centres around John Cummings, a divorced newspaper columnist, who lives in an apartment with a balcony in a large city. Over a period of some three years the plot traces his various degrees of friendship with three women who inhabit the next-door apartment and adjacent balcony. John's intentions are obvious with each of the ladies, and Foster the playwright takes great delight in showing how John tries to find the right approach to achieve his goal, but somehow manages to fumble the ball almost every time -- and I did say almost.

The sparkling dialogue, full of innuendo and double entendre, is often blatantly risque, but never becomes offensive, and Foster is a master in achieving this balance. The first neighbour is Fay, a hooker by trade, though John doesn't find this out until later. Their conversations about relationships are hilarious, considering their disparate points of view. When he finds out her profession and hears that eventually she'd like to become a lawyer, John wryly comments: "Well, it's not that big a leap." When he recounts his own divorce, his wife getting the house, the car, the kids, the boat, the cottage and the furniture, he states: "All I got was whatever fell off the roof rack as they drove away." The second neighbour is Angel, a wannabe singer who has come to the big city to make it in musical theatre. The fact that she can't act or sing doesn't deter her, and after several audition failures John consoles her with "So what if you can't sing -- there's always country music." Gwen, the third tenant who was left by her husband, listens to Leonard Cohen "when I'm down." "Yeah," says John, "that'll pull you out of it."

For the first time as I watched Foster the actor I realized how much his style, timing and delivery echoes that of Bob Newhart. That's not a bad thing, of course, for Newhart is a master of off-hand, sly but good-natured comments, and Foster's male characters abound with this, and who better to deliver them than the playwright himself. And though the characters are flawed and fumble, there's an incisiveness to them, unlike the frustration of watching Woody Allen's ditherings.

No mistake about it, Foster is a genius as both playwright and actor in his own plays, for the resonance between the two is perfection itself. Monid, as the three female characters, didn't seem quite up to her mark on Wednesday. Not that it was a bad performance, but I felt the characters needed to be drawn larger than they were, and this needed more range from Monid -- stylistically, dramatically and vocally. I felt she was holding back and not letting herself go, except in the scene where Fay gets turned on by John's refusal to have sex with her, and then Monid came alive. But nothing can detract from the brilliant humour of the play, and the audience laughed from beginning to end. Robert More directed, and as the three have collaborated on this play before, my guess is that he didn't have to do much more than say "go." The performance on Wednesday was a fundraiser for Wellington County's Habitat for Humanity, but tonight and Saturday are for the general public, and there are only three opportunities to see this gem of a play.