Tongues and the Reverend

Subject: Language in The Foreigner
The Foreigner was a delight! I enjoyed the colorful use of language and nonsense Larry Shue employed to tell Charlie’s story. The play includes two different British dialects, various forms of Southern accents, Ellard’s slow speech, and Charlie’s fictional language. Coming into this experience I was a bit concerned about the cast pulling off such a wide array of speech patterns. I have seen this play as a one act and worked with it in my high school theatre class and realize the difficulties they may have had. It can be such a chore to sustain an accent especially if there are many different ones floating around. I feared the illusion would be spoiled if the actors began rubbing off on one another verbally. I was pleasantly surprised. However, they could have pushed it a bit more with the Southern characters, namely Reverend David Marshall Lee.
I was discussing David with a fellow audience member and friend. The absence of the character’s Southern draw did not seem to bother him. In his mind, David’s clerical status, which suggests some kind of education, seemed to explain the lack of one. I hold a very different opinion. David was no doubt raised in the backwoods of Georgia and at some point he spoke the vernacular. He loves the Klan, he is engaged to a former debutant and the modern equivalent of a Southern Belle, and he is a descendant of General Robert E. Lee. Forgive my grammar, but it don’t get more Southern than that. I honestly do not see him abandoning his roots and his language. His position as a preacher obviously places him within a community that speaks much like Betty or perhaps even more like Owen Musser. The missing accent would make him a foreigner and he would probably not be well received by both his congregations (church and Klan). He needs to belong linguistically because much like Richard III, words are his weapons. Also, I think a colloquial David would have reinforced the image of sweetness and charm mentioned and praised in the script.