by Garson Kanin
Directed by Gina Wilkinson
At the Festival Theatre
May 5-November 1, 2009

    Born Yesterday is a farce that dips into sleaze but without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. I don’t mean just by its moral but by its skilled construction, character studies, texture, and wit. A comic fable about a self-made megalomaniac tycoon, Harry Brock, who thinks he can have his way totally with everyone money can buy, whether it is his seemingly dumb blonde mistress, his lawyer, an influential Washington politician, or a respectable newspaper journalist, the play can be searing and scathing. It is also sizzlingly funny. The main reason is the role of Billie Dawn, the vulgarian’s mistress, who seems to have sprung fresh out of Garson Kanin’s mind, though she has her obvious antecedents in Damon Runyon and Anita Loos. Once a chorus girl (who spoke a few trivial lines in Anything Goes), she deludes herself into believing that she could have been a star. What distinguishes her from most of her kind is her decency through all the vagaries and misfortunes of her situation. She is not drop-dead gorgeous by any means and should never be played as a glamour girl. She is willing enough to be physically owned by Harry Brock, though she is unwilling to have her mind and soul yield to his often cruel will.

   For much of the comedy, she appears to be a dumb blonde, though by the end, she turns into a sharp cookie. In the first act, she prides herself at having learned not to say “ain’t” and beats Harry Brock easily at gin rummy. In the second act, she has evidently benefited from the tutelage of a young journalist for she has taken up painting and reading Tom Paine, knows how to use a dictionary and to play Sibelius records in the right order even if she cannot correctly read their titles. By the third act, she shows the extent of her growing mind and curiosity by insisting on reading all the documents—about such things as mergers and cartels—that Brock and his henchmen have forced her to sign unthinkingly. Not for nothing is she surnamed Dawn for she gets a sudden flash of insight: she has unwittingly been used as a pawn in Harry Brock’s nefarious political and business schemes. After displaying a bold insistence on her democratic rights, including the right to her own emancipation as a woman, she and the journalist, Paul Verrall, go off together, leaving Brock to roar and bluster in apoplectic helplessness.

   The play has customarily been treated as a comedy whose radical cynicism about human greed and selfishness is leavened by frothy humour and wit. In a sense, it is an American Pygmalion-Galatea story, with the journalist’s being the Pygmalion to Billie Dawn’s innocent Galatea. Paul Verrall frees Billie from the insidious control of her tyrannical sexist brute-master, educating her not just in language and culture, but in social and gender responsibility as well. In other words, the play is also a feminist comedy that goes beyond its urge to be broadly entertaining. It may look a little outdated but that first look can be deceiving.

   The Shaw production, under Gina Wilkinson’s guiding hand, is imaginatively adroit, with Sue LePage’s set design creating the right note of opulent extravagance verging on tasteleness. Wilkinson scores the whole business of busy bellhops and their delivery of a stream of luggage like a silent comedy set to music, and then leads her players into blustery but engagingly precise farce and satire. Every character is limned distinctively and with distinction, from the henchman of Ali Momen and the Assistant Manager of Peter Millard to the journalist of Gray Powell and the drunken lawyer of Patrick Galligan who is not so drunk as to not see a loophole at twenty paces. Of course, they take their proper subordinate places to the leading players. Thom Marriott makes a strong, barking Harry Brock, an arrogant bully who loves his Cuban cigars, Scotch, and mistress whom he insults at will but to whom he is helplessly addicted. However, he doesn’t have the sort of t ender, vulnerable moment that Deborah Hay’s Billie does. As thin as a bird and with a contrived high voice, she is half broad and half dumb angel. Her tiny squeal of delight as she enjoys her rye or her deliberately loud humming of the Anything Goes chorus while she trounces Brock at gin rummy are as comic as her straight-faced remark to Verall: “You must be daffy. You don’t love me. You just love my brain.”  She shows a lovely, comic innocence. 

Photos by: David Cooper

pic 1: Deborah Hay as Billie, Gray Powell as Paul Verall

pic 2: Deborah Hay and Thom Marriott (Harry Brock)



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