On Kanin, Capra, et al…
Notes on Born Yesterday
by director Tobias Andersen

One of the rewards in producing an American theatre festival comes in discovering the relevance of many of these wonderfully crafted plays to a present day condition. There is a pleasure in this recognition; the great John Gielgud referred to it "breaking bread with the past."

Consider Harry Brock in Born Yesterday. Harry has come to Washington to secure a contract with the Federal Government whereby he may profit from the aftermath of a war, a plot line that could almost be culled from today's editorial pages. Ethics is not a word in Harry's vocabulary and sadly, neither is it for the Senator depicted in the play. The relevance of that plot point to our present time is still being debated. And while the playwright does not give us the name of Harry's company, it would seem that the logos of a number of our present corporations would look right at home on his stationery.

To our detriment, this conduct touches us all and the question, as it was fifty years ago, remains -what do we do about it? A great many playwrights and screenwriters of Kanin's day would champion that individual who would stand up, usually alone, and speak the truth. He or she would perhaps suffer for doing so, but ultimately prevail…think Jefferson Smith from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The beauty of Born Yesterday is that the playwright makes it clear that to have such champions in our midst requires an enlightened electorate, and Mr. Kanin then goes on to place the responsibility for that awakened state on the shoulders of each individual in our democracy. He also manages to pull off this civic's lesson with uproarious laughter. It's a neat trick and one worthy of being performed often.

In this play, Paul assigns Billie a number of great writers to further her education. I like to think that on that list was Robert Maynard Hughes, who said, "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." Or as Billie puts it, "Look, Harry, the idea is you can only get away with your kind of shenanigans if nobody cares about it."