Golfers won’t be hitting the greens in Maine for another two months, but the sport is in full swing at Footlights in Falmouth. The theater is teeing up hole-in-one laughs with Norm Foster’s “The Ladies Foursome.” No need to shout “fore!” The clubs are real, but these ladies only hit comic zingers.

Longtime friends Margot (Leslie Chadbourne), Connie (Gretchen G. Wood), Tate (Victoria Machado) and Catherine are a foursome at the local golf course. When Catherine is killed by lightening while riding a Ferris wheel, the remaining friends decide to pay tribute to their fourth with a round of golf. Catherine’s out-of-town friend Dory (Katherine Davis), whom they met at the funeral the day before, agrees to join them.

Secrets are revealed and friendships tested as the game becomes an 18-hole confessional about sex, children, jobs, dreams, insecurities and everything in between. No topic is out of bounds, and pot shots are par for the course.

“The Ladies Foursome” is both moving and laugh-out-loud funny. Foster has crafted a cast of characters that appear to be walking stereotypes. Margot is a lush, Connie is a sex addict, Tate is the picture-perfect surgeon’s wife and Dory claims to live an idyllic life in the back woods of Canada.

In reality, their lives are more mired than a sand trap and juicer than the wettest water hazard. The friends don’t know each other as well as they thought, and they didn’t know their dearly departed friend at all.

The Footlights Theatre’s cast members deliver performances that are humanizing and hilarious. Foster lines up the witty repartee, and the foursome plays through, scoring an albatross of laughs.

Wood is a pro, hitting zinger after zinger as Connie. Nothing is safe, or sacred. Even fairytale princesses are in her line of sight.

“They run off to a castle where they’re waited on hand and foot by two bluebirds and a squirrel,” she tells Tate to debunk them as role models for young girls.

Chadbourne and Machado match Wood as Margot and Tate, swinging power-shot laughs that go the distance. “Some of us cried. Some of us moaned,” Chadbourne quipped Friday in reference to Connie’s post-funeral fling.

Machado had the audience cracking up as she recounted her character’s initial response to her husband’s suggestion that she should play golf. “If God wanted me to play golf,” she said, “he would have given me balls.”

Davis rounds out the cast as the enigmatic Dory. Her Canadian life rant is pure fun. “I couldn’t feel my (expletive) if George Clooney himself were straddling it,” she shouts mid-tirade, colorfully painting an image of snowmobiling in the frigid winter.

Directed by Michael J. Tobin, “The Ladies Foursome” is a playful look at friendships and the hazards that can complicate them. The Footlights Theatre’s intimate stage gives the play a heartwarming feel that’s delightfully paired with plenty of laughs.

April Boyle is a freelance writer from Casco. Contact her at:

aprilhboyle@yahoo.com

Twitter: @ahboyle

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