Classic Muddle

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

BORN YESTERDAY by Garson Kanin

The audience applauds when the curtain comes up on the set, a swank Washington hotel suite, and again for the arrivals of the four leading players, each familiar from a TV series. Alas, those are just about the final occasions for enthusiasm in the labored, preachy and mostly unfunny revival of Born Yesterday that opened on Broadway this week. When the show debuted in 1946, it made stars of Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday and cemented the reputation of playwright Garson Kanin as a wry social commentator.

This time, Edward Asner (Lou Grant) achieves the seemingly impossible by overplaying the loudmouth junkyard magnate Harry Brock, who is eight parts tyrant to one part teddy bear. Madeline Kahn (Oh Madeline) gets laughs as his fed-up mistress who sets out to acquire couth and literacy, but cute faces and cunning timing do not add up to a believable person. As the crusading journalist who sets out to trap Brock and woo away his woman, Daniel Hugh Kelly (Hardcastle and McCormick) seems lobotomized. Only Franklin Cover (The Jeffersons), as a sozzled, shopworn and sardonic Washington fixer, evokes a credible human being.

The biggest loser is Kanin. His script, considered an American classic, either has dated badly or was overrated to start. It is a political, moral and especially a rhetorical muddle; its most grandiloquent speeches sound like discarded first drafts for a lesser Frank Capra movie. At the end, a Senator gets away with taking a bribe and Brock apparently gets away with murder, all with the connivance of the supposed hero and heroine. That may echo how some spectators feel about the outcome of recent insider-trading cases, but Kanin seemingly intended a shout of triumph, not this cynical sigh. By W.A.H. III