A Fox on the Fairway--"A Hole in One!"

By Chris KlimekFor The Washington City Paper(A Fox on the Fairway) is, as perhaps you’ve divined from the title, about golf, a game that large numbers of people have agreed to pretend is a sport. But of course the play is “about” golf in the way Bull Durham is about baseball, or Proof is about math. Golf is merely the stage across which Ludwig’s half-dozen characters dance a triple minuet of sexual, financial, and—if you insist—athletic competition. Each act opens with four of the actors hammily declaiming to the audience some aphorism about the game’s abiding frustrations. “Golf spelled backward is ‘flog’” was my favorite.But here’s the good news: Everything golf lacks—speed, grace, the joy of watching bodies in fluid motion, and of seeing individual talents synchronize their gifts in shared pursuit—John Rando’s drum-tight production of Fox has in abundance. It’s a grand slam! A slam dunk! A Dunkin’ Donut hole! A hole in one! (You see? Even as metaphor, golf is approximately as interesting as watching some clown in regrettable clothes tap a little stationary ball across a manicured lawnzzzzzzzzzz.)Anyway, it is the gearworks of the farce itself that is the show’s true subject. The plot turns on a wager between the presidents of two rival country clubs. Andrew Long, so frighteningly believable as the child killer in Studio’s Frozen a few years back, is here as far removed from there as could be imagined. His Richard, president of the Crouching Squirrel Country Club, is a malapropism-spouting cad who has successfully mala-propositioned every lady in his subdivision—a Woodsian accomplishment rendered all the more impressive by the fact that each sweater he inflicts upon us sears the retina more cruelly than the last. Golfers from his club have won a regional tournament for several years running.Bingham, president of Quail Valley Country Club, thinks a new player he’s found will give him the advantage this time, so he overplays his hand. He can’t afford to be placing bets, but a farce wherein the characters make prudent decisions would be like a “sport” wherein the “athletes” are ferried around the field of play on a stupid little cart! Anyway, when Quail Valley’s sure thing evaporates, Bingham drafts his new assistant, Justin—an amiable kid, freshly engaged to Louise, a waitress at the club who hasn’t yet figured out she’s the smartest person there—into the tournament. There are a dozen more reversals to come, but all that matters is that Ludwig’s perfectly designed scenario gives every one of his half-dozen characters a credible reason to surrender all dignity to the pursuit.Of course, a pristine score is no good if the band can’t play. Rando’s cast, most of whom are, like Long, more familiar from dramatic roles, throw themselves head-first into the fray, and there isn’t a laggard among them. Aubrey Deeker and Meg Steedle are guileless as Justin and Louise, the young lovers. Valerie Leonard is a holy terror as Muriel, Bingham’s exasperated wife. Holly Twyford is a boozy Pamela, a serial divorcee stapled into a series of topographic costumes that would do any Real Housewife proud.At the end of the evening, the company retakes the stage for a sort of retrospective overture, re-enacting in the space of perhaps two minutes the blocking—though “choreography” is more appropriate—of the preceding two hours. It drives home how completely reliant on the ensemble’s chemistry this piece is, and it’s a joy to behold.First among equals is Jeff McCarthy, who makes Bingham the kind of scoundrel you can’t help but root for. McCarthy is a veteran of Broadway, film, and TV, instantly recognizable to me and doubtless to tens of others as the marrow-sucking corporate suit from RoboCop 2 who thought the noble Robo was just an insubordinate, malfunctioning piece of company property. He learned the hard way that you can’t take the “cop” out of RoboCop, and just maybe that was good preparation for something like this, a comedy that hums like a well-oiled machine but retains its human soul. Also, “golf” spelled backward is “flog.”