FROM FAR TO NEAR

Broadway in Review

By Rosamond Gilder
from Theatre Arts, April 1946

(Thanks to Marie Iovino for submitting this article to the JHRC)

     Besides these two unusual theatrical excursions (Antigone and Lute Song) the mid-season provided New York with what it craved in the field of pure divertisement: a new farce-comedy guaranteed to rock the rafters. Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, written and directed by the author with consummate zest, rockets along through three joyous acts taking pot-shots at our legislators, at racketeers, time-servers and tarts. This is the Broadway formula hammered down tight: a wisecrack in every sentence, a smashing curtain line for each act, tough talk and plenty of action --- and behind it all a vigorous satiric intent: in this case an attack on gangster techniques in business and venality in high places.

     The heroine of this loud-mouthed idyl is a dim-witted chorus girl --- deliciously played by Judy Holliday --- whose current protector is a super-junkman, a dealer in scrap metal who plans an international cartel in his particular commodity and is in the process of manipulating legislation for that purpose. This giant racketeer, into whom Paul Douglas hurls all of his bone and muscle and the vigor and violence of his acting, is fond of the little number he has picked from the chorus line. He festoons her with diamonds, gives her not one but two mink coats, dresses her to the nines and finally decides that she needs a little culture. She is even less 'couth' than he, though that would seem to be impossible. A young newspaper man, stalking the racketeer for his liberal paper, is seduced into attempting the job by Billie's rampant charms. She proves herself an unexpectedly apt pupil. By the second act she is learning how and what to read, even, vaguely, how to think. This was not in the contract; a free-for-all between Billie, her 'protector' and the newspaper lad ensues. Billie is of course triumphant, but not before verbal and physical mayhem have been committed and everyone on and off the stage has had a rousing good time.

     Miss Holliday, who made her mark in a short scene in Kiss Them for Me last season, has in Billie a role that exactly fits her, giving her an opportunity to display at much greater length, but within the same framework, those qualities of physical, almost animal, appeal and of human tenderness and pathos that she managed to convey so vividly in her previous appearance. Mr. Kanin has of course given her much more territory to cover. She has an opportunity to strengthen and vary her comedy technique. Her 'malapropisms' are engaging. 'The country', she sagely reminds her junkman, 'belongs to the people that inhibit it.' At another point, after a battle royal, the two play a card game that is as beautifully deft and witty a bit of acting as could be desired. Miss Holliday is developing as a comedian and she has excellent partners in Paul Douglas as the racketeer, Gary Merrill as the newspaper man and Otto Hulett as the broken and disillusioned lawyer who acts the Greek chorus to this tragi-comedy of corruption.

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