CAST goes country! 

Watch where you're steppin', city boys and city gals! Carolina Actors Studio Theatre -- where past audiences have voyaged into the innards of a computer's motherboard, to the brink of nuclear disaster, to a high school reunion, to a bloody crime scene, and beyond -- now takes us to a haunted farmstead near the peak of Stony Lonesome Mountain. Yee-ha!

When Foxfire opens on Sept. 11 at CAST's multitheater complex on Clement Avenue, you won't really have to dodge cow-pies. But CAST remains the home of experiential theater, so the Hume Cronyn/Susan Cooper play with music will surely spark a signature transformation that will be instantly evident as you enter.

CAST managing artistic director Michael Simmons is going overboard to deliver this Hee-Haw-style welcome.

"We'll have a horse barn when you come into the theater," he cordially explains. "Hanging on the lobby wall you'll see the riding accoutrements -- bridles, horse collars. Frank Hodges from the Hodges dairy farm loaned us all this barn wood that we dressed up the lobby in."

That is merely the beginning -- as anyone knows if he or she has experienced past CAST productions of Autobahn, Dark Play, or the recent sell-out smash hit, Limbo.

"When you get into the bar area, we've got a nice little county fair ticket booth going on," Simmons elaborates, "and we're redressing the bar. We've got a couple of hundred-year-old church bells, and we've turned the bathrooms into outhouses. You know us. We certainly brought in enough flies with the barn wood and the straw, but we've debugged the theater."

Foxfire centers around Dillard Nations and his attempts to keep both his family and his band, the Stony Lonesome Boys, together. His quest brings him home along country roads -- John Denver played the role on film opposite Cronyn -- to his elderly mamaw's farmhouse. He needs her to take care of his young 'uns, and he's worried about her staying up there by her lonesome.

Dillard's plans conveniently intersect with those of Prince Carpenter, a representative of the Mountain Development Corporation, who would rather see Cadillacs and Continentals along the mountainside than trailer homes and whisky stills. That doesn't mean, of course, that Dillard is any more eager to sell off his ancient patrimony than old Aunt Annie. Up yonder, Dillard comes to terms with his feelings toward home -- and toward his pappy, the mysterious and notorious Hector Nations.

Simmons is no less inclined to put his actors through the same experiential hoops that he puts us. If you're a member of the Stony Lonesome Boys, that means some truly extraordinary conditioning.

"Two Friday nights ago, they had a bluegrass festival at the Great Aunt Stella Center," he recalls mischievously, "and we sent our bluegrass band. Glenn [Hutchinson], who was playing Dillard before his dad got ill, and our musicians actually played at the festival as the Stony Lonesome Boys. I made them all go in character. The guy who plays Hector, Charles LaBorde, sat in the pews while they were playing and griped about how you can't make a living being a banjo picker and all the lines from the show. He was cleverly -- and entertainingly -- annoying."

To play passably well at a bluegrass festival, in character or not, you need bona fide bluegrass musicians on dobro, guitar and mandolin. Simmons plucked these from the Charlotte Folk Society, including bandleader Peter McCranie, who wrote many of the arrangements, plus a couple of songs just to underscore the show.

"Just like a film," Simmons remarks, "when certain things happen, you'll hear those themes reprised throughout the show. It's really wonderfully put together."

Simmons has been wanting to do this show for more than two years -- and many in Charlotte may have waited impatiently for more than 20 years to see it. For some occult reason, we've only gotten our first whiff of Smoke on the Mountain (at Pineville Dinner Theater) and Foxfire within the past year.

"I knew that Hume Cronyn was a great character actor and had a role in the Cocoon movies," Simmons says. "What I didn't realize was that he was a writer and, in particular, I didn't realize that he had written the songs, music and lyrics for this show. I advocated that we do Foxfire for a couple of reasons. One, it's a touching piece -- you know, we're all getting older. Aging is something we have to deal with. Second, I thought we could do it differently than maybe someone else would do it. I really liked that we're doing it in a much more intimate environment instead of a proscenium."

CAST's previous attempt to stage Foxfire fell apart when availabilities of actors, actresses and musicians couldn't be aligned. It almost happened again when Hutchinson dropped out. Simmons not only had to replace his protagonist, he also had to find an actor who could play that gee-tar.

Hutchinson gets a pass from Simmons because he's a friend -- and because he was largely responsible for CAST's first-ever sold-out run as the author of Limbo. Above all, he gets that pass because Simmons was able to find Mike Sharpe, another accomplished guitarist, to replace him on insanely short notice.

Others in the Foxfire cast include Paula Baldwin as Annie, Desirée Ricker as Holly, Ted Eltzroth as Prince, and Chris Brown as the Doctor. In his beard, overalls and moonshiner's cap, the venerable LaBorde is virtually unrecognizable as Hector.

Struggling with health issues, Simmons has fortified his creative team in recent years. The talent pool widens again for the 2008-09 season after Simmons directs Monster - The Real Story of Frankenstein for Charlotte's hallowed Halloween season. Tony Wright will be directing Killer Joe, Matt Cosper will make his CAST debut directing Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, and Paige Johnston will return to direct No Exit.

Simmons will turn CAST into a pool next spring when he directs Metamorphoses. The notorious Mary Zimmerman reimagining of Ovid's seminal masterwork was a watershed Broadway production in 2002 at Circle in the Square -- and very few other places.

"I read it and I thought, wow, this is great," Simmons remembers. "I knew I really liked the show when I read the scene with the Sun God and his son when he was floating on the raft, smoking a cigar, wearing dark sunglasses. If anybody was going to turn their theater into a pool, it should be CAST, because every time it rains hard, our thrust theater floods from all that water coming down from Central Avenue. So I said we should just do it. We'll just hope for a tropical storm!"