A whole new Dawn A whole new Dawn (January 23, 2004)

Garson Kanin's 1946 play ages poorly, despite its ostensible political parallels

by Ben Marks

Garson Kanin's "Born Yesterday" must have looked pretty radical when it premiered on Broadway in 1946. Here was a play that dared to question the patriotism of businessmen and legislators alike in the aftermath of World War II, a conflict that was enthusiastically supported by Americans of all political stripes.

Turns out the play was, in fact, a little too hot for Hollywood to handle. By 1950, when the George Cukor directed film was released, Kanin's cynically sympathetic musings about the relative merits of Communism had been replaced by a travelogue-style visit to our nation's capital to see the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Today the play, which is being resurrected with mixed results by the Palo Alto Players at the Lucie Stern Theatre through Feb. 1, merely feels irrelevant. As much as anything, it is the premise of the play that audiences will find far-fetched. We're supposed to believe that a dashing and intelligent Washington, D.C. journalist named Paul Verrall (Woody Taft) has nothing better to do than accept an assignment from unscrupulous junk millionaire Harry Brock (Brian Buckley Smith) to smarten up his long-time live-in girlfriend, Billie Dawn (Shannon Stowe).

Brock's motivation for improving Dawn's mind is to show her off to those congressmen and senators he has not yet bribed to further his business interests. Verrall's motivation is $200 a week from Brock (it went a lot farther in 1946 than it would today, but still...), plus Dawn's not-so-subtle promises of even more enticing rewards.

Stowe's Dawn is confident and funny, a woman who's in complete control of things even when her brutish boyfriend commands her to shut her yap. Sure she had a tough time of it growing up (her father, she tells Verrall, single-parented Dawn and her three siblings on a gas-meter-reader's paycheck), but it didn't take long to find her way into a chorus line and onto the arm of a wealthy, if occasionally abusive, sugar daddy.

Even in the play's first act, when she still wears her ditzy-chorus-girl persona on a gossamer sleeve, Dawn has the power to bring the action on stage to a standstill, as she does every time she ascends a flight of stairs, seemingly propelled from behind by the undulating mechanics of her rising and falling hips. By the third act, when Dawn bustles about her gilded cage while all but ignoring her fulminating soon-to-be-former boyfriend, her triumph is complete.

Dawn may be dumb but she ain't stupid. The same cannot be said for Harry Brock, who is in our nation's capital to make sure he's getting his money's worth out of Senator Norval Hedges (John Watson), who he's bribed to the tune of 80 large. Brock's bombastic blusterings and dismissive snarls are convincingly delivered by Smith. When he browbeats Dawn, barks orders at his neutered alcoholic lawyer, Ed Devery (John Baldwin), and yells for his hapless flunky cousin, Eddie (Don DeMico), we wince.

But with the exception of a memorable card scene with Stowe, Smith's physical interactions with his fellow actors are less successful than his verbal assaults. Though he has excellent stage presence, his actual movements about the stage vacillate between too tentative and too aggressive. Smith is especially at sea during the play's few fight scenes, which are clumsily staged and not convincingly executed (if it's any consolation to director Mark Mezadourian, Cukor himself could do no better in the film, so you're in pretty good company).

Several bit players give the production needed depth. DeMico's Eddie Brock is particularly good, playing the character like a man who's received one too many punches in the gut from his bully-employer cousin. He shuffles about the stage like a gangster Geisha, picking up Harry's shoes, mixing drinks and paying off inquisitive hotel managers, all while varying his facial expressions (big eyes one moment, suspicious squints the next) to suit the scene. Similarly, the drunker Baldwin's Devery gets, the more fun he is to watch. But the biggest scene stealer is Carolyn Ford Compton, who's all-too-brief appearance in the first act as the wife of Senator Hedges is hilarious (which is saying a lot since she gets most of her laughs simply by raising an eyebrow or forcing a tight smile in reaction to Dawn's many memorable malapropisms).

Less successful is Taft's turn as Paul Verrall. Taft capably introduces his character to us in the first few scenes, but he never takes it anywhere. In fairness, William Holden played this role almost as stiffly in the film version, but Holden's performance would not hold up in 2004.

And this is the real problem with "Born Yesterday." It's not Taft -- he's obviously a decent actor, he just needs to inhabit his characters a bit farther below their polished surfaces. Nor is it this or that fight scene that fails to convince. No, the problem is that the play simply does not age as well as director Mezadourian would have us believe.

For Mezadourian, "Born Yesterday" is an oracle from the past, predicting everything from our nation's imperial and imperious president to the no-bid contracts that were given to Halliburton to rebuild Iraq. I don't have a problem with Mezadourian's political critique, but this play is a poor stone upon which to grind this particular ax. It's a dated, period comedy, and not even a particularly screwball one at that, whose heroine appears to contemporary eyes to be much smarter than Kanin gave her credit.

It wouldn't take the Billie Dawn of today very long to realize that not only is Harry Brock a poor catch, but this Verrall guy is just another elitist snob, despite his liberal, politically correct pretensions. I give the relationship six months.

What: "Born Yesterday," by Garson Kanin, presented by the Palo Alto Players
Where: Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto
When: Through Feb. 1. Show times are 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. on Sunday Feb. 1
Cost: $21 for Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday performances, $25 for Friday and Saturday evenings. Students and seniors receive a $3 discount for Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday performances.
INFO: Please call (650) 329-0892 or visit www.paplayers.org

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