Exhibitionism

Born Yesterday

Long before we hear the line “Some people are always givin’ it, and some people are always takin’ it,” we know which camp Harry Brock belongs in. No sooner has the junk tycoon entered the swank suite of his Washington, D.C. hotel than he’s bellowing commands at flunky and friend alike: to get him a drink, get him a shave, get him a proxy signature on his latest shady business deal. Everybody in this man’s orbit is expected to give, give, give, while he takes, takes, takes. Indeed, he’s come to the nation’s capital to grease the Congressional wheels on his bid to take control of all the scrap metal in Europe left from World War Deuce. And he expects to get it – just like he expects to get a senator’s assistance for a briefcase of Benjamins. He’s a bully, with a bully’s sense of entitlement to whatever he wants because he wants it and sees everyone else as weak.

Watching Michael Stuart stomp around the set for Austin Playhouse’s production of Born Yesterday, Brock’s strong-arm smugness couldn’t be clearer. The actor dominates the stage, his six-foot-plenty frame towering over the posh furniture and every actor he faces. His dictates to his minions – i.e., everybody – boom with the menace and shock value of a thunderclap, wherein you hear the fury of the gathering storm. And when that storm breaks, this easygoing actor pounds his fists on books and rips out their pages with a violence that unsettles. Our sense that Brock is bite as well as bark keeps the stakes high in this revival of Garson Kanin’s 65-year-old comedy, which, as staged by Artistic Director Don Toner with a crackerjack cast, never shows its age.

The one soft spot in Stuart’s beastly Brock is, naturally, a beauty: his educationally challenged mistress, Billie Dawn. He figures he can refine her for D.C. society with a little schooling from the journalist down the hall – Benjamin Summers, serving up a tart cocktail of political savvy and democratic idealism – but the plan backfires when Billie takes the tutor as a lover and gets a lesson in civics from him that lets her put the kibosh on Harry’s underhanded schemes. Andrea Osborn makes a welcome return to the Playhouse stage as Billie, and despite a less-than-convincing platinum-blonde wig, she’s a treat: an ex-chorine with moxie to spare and a kisser that beams as she discovers that this thinking thing is actually kind of a kick. Watching her petite figure face down Stuart’s Brobdingnagian Brock is the comic personification of every little guy (or gal) standing up to a big, bad thug. And when Stuart sinks into a chair, dumbstruck, it’s like a sequoia toppling – which, in our age of Super PACs and avaricious multinationals, might leave you thinking of a few latter-day Harry Brocks you’d like to see chopped down by Billie Dawn.

This article appears in May 25 • 2012.