"Born Yesterday' at the Walnut

Garson Kanin's 1946 comedy Born Yesterday drew cleverly on not one but two venerable theatrical formulas: The underclass turns the tables on the rich and powerful (e.g., Mozart's Marriage of Figaro); and an ostensibly superior male seeks to elevate an ostensibly ignorant woman, thereby unleashing forces beyond his control (e.g., Shaw's Pygmalion). Born Yesterday also catered to a certain post-World War II liberal/idealistic notion, first articulated by Jefferson, that ignorance was the greatest obstacle to human progress and education was the obvious remedy.

If you bought into these not unreasonable concepts, you could accept Kanin's necessary caricatures and witty repartee and enjoy yourself for one evening. In this case the heavy is Harry Brock, a rough-and-tumble junkyard tycoon whose only guiding philosophy is: "Money talks." Harry has installed himself in a presidential Washington hotel suite— with his dumb-blonde mistress, his corrupted lawyer and his faithful flunky in tow— for the purpose of buying Senators in order to expand his business empire.

Harry's heaviest albatross is his floozy girlfriend Billie Dawn, who is prone to gaffes like, "Well, it's a free country," when a Senator confesses that he's a little sentimental. Harry presumes that anything can be bought for a price, so to polish Billie's rough edges he hires a journalist named Paul Verrall to expose her to culture and book learning.

A Frank Capra scenario

Big mistake: Paul, you see, is an idealist, and he exposes Billie to so much information that in short order she realizes Harry's a crook, shines the ugly light of truth on his nefarious schemes, and the truth sets us all free, just as it inevitably does in a Frank Capra movie.

Is such a scenario still relevant? In one sense, of course. Less than two years ago a rough-and-tumble (albeit honest) insurance executive named Tom Knox spent $10 million in an attempt to buy himself the Philadelphia mayoralty and came remarkably close to succeeding. But if the Harry Brocks of the world are still with us, the Billie Dawns are pretty well obsolete. Billie (like Eliza Doolittle and Norma Rae) is the prototype "smart stupid person" idealized by Jefferson: the underrated babe in the woods who needs only an education to transform her basic decency and common sense into a powerful force for global virtue.

We, on the other hand, live in an age of "stupid smart people," like those 4,000-plus millionaire geniuses (including the revered Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel) who put their life savings— at a minimum of $2 million each— in one basket: that of the avuncular Ponzi swindler Bernie Madoff. And need I mention the 1,100 Philadelphia arts administrators, college endowment managers, foundation executives and church deacons who entrusted $500 million to John G. Bennett's similarly fraudulent Foundation for New Era Philanthropy back in the '90s?

When things get preachy

For at least its first act, the Walnut Street Theatre's lavish first-rate revival of Kanin's comedy moves at a fast-pace and goes down very easily. Only in the second act, when Billie's tutor Paul gets preachy— speechifying about the roots of fascism and declaring, "A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in"— does this good-natured parade of mostly-stale caricatures grow tiresome.

In the dumb-blonde role made famous on Broadway by Judy Holliday, Kate Fahrner is all you could ask: a delectable piece of arm candy with a maddeningly squeaky voice (reminiscent of Holliday herself, not to mention Jean Hagen in Singing in The Rain)— a gal, in short, who has bimbo written all over her. The beefy, intimidating Marco Verna as Harry similarly has big lug written all over him. Darren Michael Hengst is appropriately earnest as the journalist Paul. And so on. The only problem is that these characters aren't recognizable people, at least in this century.

What a wonderful world this would be if our real heroes were so unequivocally noble! If our villains were so obviously villainous and ignorant! If their lackeys so clearly recognized their own moral failings! (As we were recently reminded, even some of Vince Fumo's minions believed, as he did, that mowing Fumo's lawns and spying on his girlfriends constituted a form of public service.)

Broadway in 1946: A different context

Broadway audiences in 1946 willingly suspended their disbelief because, after all, they'd just come through a war and could use a few laughs at the expense of defense contractors who made fortunes while 400,000 Americans got killed. Even now, no doubt, some comedy writer is working on a script about the AIG bonus babies who were rewarded with millions for wrecking the world's financial markets. When times are tough, people need distraction. Born Yesterday is a comedy that tries to eat its cake and have it too: It offers blissful distraction even while insisting that what we really need is education. It's fun as far as it goes, but by now it's sort of like reading a comic book. I would have enjoyed it much more if the script had been updated to reflect today's realities.