Born Yesterday

When I saw Nina Arianda in David Ives' Venus in Fur last year at the Classic Stage Company, I was convinced it was one of the best performances I had ever seen. Crazy, then, that it was also her first major production. If there is such a thing in the theater anymore, it felt like a star-making performance. With her striking features, biting humor, and capacity for stunning (but controlled) rage, she tore the stage up. You can throw any cliched adjective at the performance she gave: breathtaking, incandescent, stunning... Basically, she was fucking brilliant, and I couldn't rip my eyes away from her. So when she was announced for the lead in Broadway's Born Yesterday, I was super excited. Someone had noticed her and was giving her a lead even though her only significant credit was an off-Broadway limited run. Happily, I can say that she beams from the stage in Born Yesterday in another fabulous performance. Unhappily...the rest of the show is dated, flat, and poorly performed.

Let's start with the problem of Jim Belushi. As a rich jackass trying to buy his way into politics, there is no line or action that he doesn't over-deliver. Yes, Harry is supposed to be loud and abrasive. But loud and abrasive people still have a variety of volumes and temperaments in their wheelhouse. Belushi cranks the dial to 11 and oversells everything aggressively. It's bad enough that people had to watch this kind of terrible performance when I was in theater in high school hamming things up and shouting my lines. But for this to be what's being delivered to theatergoers paying real money is shameful.

Robert Sean Leonard, as the civilized writer down the hall in Harry's hotel does a much better job of creating a character. He is quite believable as a resentful yet sophisticated man who hates everything Harry stands for. Leonard's problem, though, is that he doesn't seem to have been informed that he's in a comedy. Certainly not that he's in the sort of comedy that doesn't benefit from emotional truth. This is pretty slapsticky stuff, and it demands a lot more mugging that he's prepared to give. He's giving the flipside of Belushi's performance. One is so loud you want him to disappear. The other is so quiet, he threatens to do just that.

Only Arianda strikes a balance. As Harry's dimwitted girlfriend Billie, she has a high-pitched New Yawk accent and is fiercely ditzy--seeming to have chosen idiocy as a protective measure against a cruel world. She's heartbreaking when you really think about where she is in her life, but you never lose sight of the fact that she's still, on the surface, totally hysterical.

Born Yesterday was probably a lot fizzier and more charming 60 years ago when seeing a woman get beaten was probably slightly less shocking. That scene, along with a handful of others, is so deeply throwing, not because they're difficult to watch (or not JUST because), but because they seem deeply, uncomfortably out of place tonally.

In the end, as much as I appreciated seeing a remarkable performance, the show itself and the rest of the performances sank this totally. I'll still see Arianda in whatever she does next. I just hope it's much, much better than this.