Born Yesterday
by Garson Kanin
STUDIO THEATRE, June 10, 11, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 30, July 1, 2
One of the longest running Broadway comedies of all time.
A dishonest scrap dealer, Harry Brock, brings his showgirl mistress, Billie Dawn to Washington, where he plans to bribe a Congressman. When her ignorance becomes a liability, he hires journalist Paul to educate her. In the process, Billie realizes how corrupt Harry really is. Still hilarious, still relevant.
Featuring Scott Free, Jeffrey T. Heyer and Cindy Womack.
Harry Brock (Scott Free) realizes that mistress Billie Dawn (Heather Osteraa) might be a liability when trying to rub elbows with the big wigs of D.C. with her socially inappropriate behavior and ignorant vocabulary.
Harry Brock (Scott Free) pays for Billie Dawn (Heather Osteraa) to be educated by upright, idealistic reporter Paul Verrall (Chuck Church).
Billie Dawn (Heather Osteraa) gains knowledge and ideals from Paul Verral (Chuck Church) with a side of romance.
Billie Dawn (Heather Osteraa) and Paul Verrall (Chuck Church) confront corrupt business man, Harry Brock (Scott Free) on his ways of handling business.
Brock’s lawyer Ed Deverry (JTHeyer) gets Billie (Heather Osteraa) to show him one of the lines she delivered during her brief showbiz career.
4792 Rare photo of Cindy Womack (as Mrs. Hedges) onstage with Scott Free (Harry Brock) and JTHeyer (Ed Deverry). Senator Hedges played by Dennis Hungridge. These Three Musketeers have shared many of the same plays and theaters yet seldom meet on the boards.
Ed Deverry (JTHeyer) with ever-present glass of bourbon.
Ed Deverry (JTHeyer)
Born Yesterday
Posted on June 12, 2017
By Philip Pearce
I ENJOYED the opening night of The Western Stage’s new production of Born Yesterday once I got over some heavy-handed opening “improvements??? that have been added to the script. Jeff McGrath, a director I have always admired and frequently praised on this web site, has chosen to launch the play twenty minutes before curtain time by bringing on most of the cast and having them mill around the Studio Theater pretending to be patrons of a sleazy night club operated by the two central characters, Harry Brock and Billie Dawn. They all dance and chatter and improvise interactions with audience members and, for the life of me, I’m still wondering why.
Does McGrath think Studio Theater patrons need extra insight into the leading characters? Has he decided Garson Kanin’s exemplary script doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that Brock is a belligerent money-grabbing roughneck and Billie a bubble-headed blonde? Or was all this forced merriment a way of suggesting that what lay ahead was the kind of free-for-all American farce that’s full of dancing teenagers, slamming doors, mistaken identities and snappy exit lines—which Born Yesterday isn’t?
I put aside my puzzlement when the actual play began, only to see an unlisted character (was that Fred Herro?) march in, all done up like a Russian diplomat in fur hat and briefcase. Greeted and welcomed—as “Vladimir??? I think—he then disappeared through one of the bedroom doors of John Englehorn’s tasteful set, and only returned and exited in the final moments of the last act. If this was a wink and nudge at present day Washington and Moscow the audience either didn’t get the joke or, if they did, didn’t find it funny enough to laugh at.
Once all the cute creativity was over, the craft and humor of the original story and the work of a talented cast took over. It all became a fast and funny take on a 60-year-old Broadway and movie hit that reminds us, at a point when we really need reminding, that a democracy only survives if it’s made up of wise and informed citizens.
The plot of Born Yesterday follows the pleasant Cinderella girl pattern set by Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. Like Shaw’s Eliza, Kanin’s Billie Dawn is linked to a pompous and oppressive guy who decides she needs a crash course in the social graces. Like Eliza, ex-chorus girl Billie (“I said lines!???) proves to be such a quick study that her newfound education empowers her to defeat and disarm her oppressive benefactor.
Heather Osteraa is a revelation in the role. She adopts the required nasal New York squeak but never lets it mask the ins and outs of a complex, layered and ultimately lovable character. No production of Born Yesterday can really succeed if Billie doesn’t do justice to her famous gin rummy scene with boyfriend Harry. It’s a central element of her characterization: the erratic skill she demonstrates with the cards gives the lie to Harry’s claim that she’s just a “stupid broad“ and it helps make believable her quick subsequent responses to art, music and political literature. The gin sequence is a highpoint of the new TWS version, because Osteraa gives it her own individual stamp, refusing to copy Judy Holliday’s Oscar-winning movie rendition. Where Holiday concentrates so obsessively on her gin cards that she almost misses the fact that she‘s already taken another game from Harry, Osteraa’s Billie is already so blithely confident that her annoying humming of “Anything Goes??? is offered as a teasing challenge to Harry’s inferiority as a card player.
Equity actor Scott Free’s Harry is appropriately strident, loud and conceited but never lets the man become just a Johnny-one-note baddie. Harry’s real if stunted humanity usually emerges when he truculently confesses, “I love that broad.??? Surprisingly, Free doesn’t make much of that line, but instead mines sympathy for Harry in his final, desperate scramble to keep Billie from running off with her tutor, Paul Verrall.
As the highbrow reporter who first educates and then woos Billie, Chuck Church is convincing enough though I would have welcomed a more ironic and leisured and a less fast-talking approach to the part.
It’s always a treat to watch the gifted Jeffrey T. Heyer at work and he’s on hand here to play the most interesting of the three major male characters. Ed Devery is the slick, philosophic lawyer/mouthpiece who keeps Harry Brock just windward of the law by insuring that all his junkyard business contracts are signed not by Harry but by his unwitting “silent partner??? Billie. Devery sees the moral implications of this and of Harry’s wheeling and dealing for money and political clout with a crooked Senator named Norval Hedges, played by Dennis Hungridge with a nice undertone of slime hidden beneath a benign senatorial surface. Devery is never duped but always too boozed up and personally implicated to do anything but mordantly connive in all this dirty work. Heyer has never been better than in the play’s final elegiac words, a rueful toast to the enlightened dumb broads of this wicked world and the inspired eggheads who enlighten them.
It’s a pleasing show which manages to hit most of the marks in a clever script in spite of some misjudged efforts to add gratuitous and unnecessary hokum.
It plays weekends through July 2nd.