D.C. Review: Born Yesterday is Not So Dumb at Arena Stage

The name Garson Kanin might draw blank stares today from even some theatre people, but it used to be that seeing it under a "written and directed by" was a badge of quality—the near-guarantee that a play or film would crackle with high comic style and verve.

Born Yesterday is arguably the pinnacle of Kanin's somewhat undersung career; this play about a not-so-dumb dame is currently receiving a savvy and biting production at Arena Stage. 

The play twists Pygmalion into a class-sex comedy set against the swindling political backdrop of 1945 WashingtonD.C. The Galatea/Eliza Doolittle in question is Billie Dawn, a role immortalized on stage and screen by Judy Holliday.

In Born Yesterday, Billie (Suli Holum) is the mistress of Harry Brock (Jonathan Fried), a junkyard baron with the voice and vocabulary of a gangster and the moral fibre—and ambition—of a fascist. With Billie in tow, he has come to a swank hotel (Kate Edmunds' elegant set) to work out a deal with Senator Norval Hedges (Terrence Currier), who is a puppet on his purse strings. For a healthy tip, Hedges is willing to loosen the regulations that might have kept the multimillionaire Harry from reselling the metals of WW2 weaponry at jacked-up prices. Harry is supported in his shady dealings by the disillusioned Ed Devery (the superb Rick Foucheux).

Billie, however, poses a slight problem. Harry is not only not married to the ex-chorine (who having never been on the road, is a newcomer to D.C.), but he finds her uncultured honk and uninformed conversation humiliating—"Every time she open her mouth, somethin' wrong come out." He attempts to resolve matters by having a well-read writer named Paul Verrall (the handsomely tweedy Michael Bakkensen) tutor Billie, who is at first resistant to the scheme; she resents having to look up every single word when Paul makes her read Marx. Before long however, she is sporting a pair of glasses, exchanging the marabou and lace for more subdued get-ups (Michael Krass' clever designs) and using adverbs correctly. She's also beginning to rethink her relationship with the abusive Harry. Not too suprisingly, she's found a healthier one with Paul.

Born Yesterday's characters inhabit a vividly amped-up world that doesn't always shield them from touches of caricature, but director Kyle Donnelly makes the most of it by staging the show like a Technicolored 40s film farce. The staff and guests of the hotel move to a comically syncopated rhythm with the kind of spring-heeled snap of the characters in those classic movies. In the opening scene of the second act, Billie (who is prone to bursting into spastic renditions of "Anything Goes") dances around with a newspaper to swing music so beguilingly that I couldn't help but wonder what Born Yesterday would be like as a musical.

As Billie, Holum gives a delectably daffy (and sometimes moving) performance; she's blissfully ignorant in the best sense. With swinging hips, a helium voice and unerring timing, she gobbles up scenery as if it was made of Godiva chocolate. When quizzed as to what a peninsula is, she chimes in "It's a new medicine!;" the line is ten times funnier with Holum's delivery. Yet even before her transformation, there's no way of mistaking her for dumb. Holum's Billie is a sexual card shark who always knows where her aces are. She even beats Harry at gin rummy and collects her winning cash with the aplomb of a Wall Street CEO.

As Harry, Fried is fiercely, coarsely malevolent. At one point, after deciding that he doesn't want to smarten Billie up after all, he tears up a book so violently that I felt I was witnessing a murder. At times, he could bear to tone it down. One of the flaw's in Kanin's play is that Harry is an out-an-out villain, and Fried makes him so much of a bellowing monster that the character's humanity begins to feel swallowed up.

The butchering of these Brentano's products is so unsettling because it represents everything to which Billie was once blind. It's not only greed that breeds theft, corruption, murder and all the other ills of society—it's ignorance. Near the end of the play, Billie condemns Harry; "I ended up with an empty head and you." The awakening of Billie's intellect and conscience go hand in hand here, because Kanin doesn't see much difference between the two.

Despite being somewhat predictable and too cartoonish at times, Born Yesterday is a fine play because it takes heavy subjects like economic fascism, the intellectual subjugation of women and political blindness and stirs them into a sparkling play of ideas that makes the audience think the hardest in the middle of a laugh. And there are wonderful digs at politics that are relevant even today; when Billie asks what the Supreme Court is, she gets the response "Lots of people would like to know the answer to that one." In Arena Stage's Born Yesterday, knowledge is the most amusing kind of power.

Born Yesterday runs through November 6th at Arena Stage.

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