‘The Ladies Foursome’ tees off at the Modern Spokane

Norm Foster’s play “The Ladies Foursome” takes place during a round of golf, and any regular golfer will tell you that a lot can happen over the course of 18 holes.

The show, which opens Friday at the Modern Theater Spokane, is about a group of women who have been golfing together for many years, and it begins shortly after one of them has died.

“It’s about 14 years of friendship,” said the show’s director, Dawn Taylor Reinhardt. “There are some confrontational interactions, and it’s full of very dry wit. A lot of secrets are revealed about them on the course. It’s very different from what I normally do.”

She’s referring to the tone of the play rather than its construction. Like Reinhardt’s last few productions with the Modern (the dramas “Other Desert Cities” and “Reasons to Be Happy”), “The Ladies Foursome” carefully examines the long-term relationships among a small group of characters. The big difference is that this show is a comedy.

“It’s a simple, fun entertainment,” Reinhardt said. “I think (audiences) will be satisfied with how it ends, and they’ll probably walk away feeling good about life.”

The remaining friends who make up the titular quartet are successful businesswoman Margot (Marianne McLaughlin), TV news anchor Connie (Callie McKinney Cabe) and stay-at-home mother Tate (Nancy Gasper). During an afternoon of golf, they’re joined by a woman named Dory (Sarah Miller), who also attended their friend’s funeral.

As the group traverses the golf course, they talk, and as they talk, truths are revealed and secrets unearthed. The key to making this material sing, Reinhardt says, is to portray the characters as believably as possible. This is a light comedy about behavior and personalities, and how longtime friends relate to one another in specific ways.

“You have to play it straight,” Reinhardt said. “I didn’t want them to become caricatures, (but instead) for them to be real women on a golf course,” Reinhardt said. “Everybody will have known one of these women in their lives.”

Although “The Ladies Foursome” seems like a relatively simple production, Reinhardt says there have been some technical challenges in creating the illusion of an entire golf course within a relatively small theater space.

Her actors had to learn the ins and outs of golf, the difference “between the iron and the wood, what’s a par 4 and what’s a par 5,” she said. “That was a surprise, I think, for all of us – how much goes into making it honest and making these women look like they really know what they’re doing.”