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by Laura Anne Harris, directed by Judith McDowell

Katie and Pearl Productions, Toronto Fringe Festival Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto, July 8-17, 2011;

Toronto Centre for the Arts, Best of the Fringe Uptown, Toronto, July 23, 2011

Laura Anne Harris’s Pitch Blond, which premiered at the Victoria Fringe Festival in 2007, has finally made it to Toronto and has lost none of its relevance.  The solo show focusses on much-loved actor Judy Holliday (1922-65), who in her short life become the epitome of the “dumb blonde” on stage and screen.  That may have been how she found fame, but, in fact, her IQ was measured at 172.  She wanted to write and direct plays, but those avenues were not as open to women then as they are now.  Like many performers of the period, Holliday was called before the Senate Internal Security Committee, the Senate’s equivalent to the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify why her name had been linked to what were called “Communist front organizations.”

After beginning the show with Holliday’s appearance as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?, Harris segues from those innocuous questions to questions posed to her by the Senate Committee in 1952 where the wrong answer could ruin not only the respondent’s career but those of his or her friends and family.  Harris then uses the questions to trigger flashbacks to Holliday’s past from growing up in Queens with her clinging suicidal mother to her first jobs to the eight of her career when she won the Oscar for Best actress in 1950 for her performance as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday.  Holliday had many counts against her including her background.  Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants and her uncle was a member of the Communist party.  Various co-workers were said to have Communist sympathies, Holliday’s lived for a time with another woman and Holliday posed for photos with striking workers and signed a document with other performers that the Senate Committee thought suspicious.

How did Holliday deal with these allegations without implicating others, i.e. “naming names” that the investigators used to root out the perceived Communist conspiracy?  She played a dumb, specifically the dumb blond character of so many movies.

Harris has Holliday’s high-pitched voice and vocal mannerisms down perfectly, including her distinctive laughing sigh that trails off after statements of befuddlement.  Harris clearly distinguished the dumb blond act from Holliday’s real voice when she describes and re-enacts scenes from her past.  While the Congressional investigation into un-American activities by those in the entertainment world seems like a massive folly today, we need only look a current events where certain politicians on the right try to tar President Obama and other democrats as “Communists” and “socialists” plus recent attempts by the right to rehabilitate the reputation of Senator Joseph McCarthy to realize that this fear of a left-wing conspiracy has not gone away.

Harris’s play shows not just Holliday’s public triumphs but her personal unhappiness to create a very sympathetic central figure.  Although Harris likely does not want to expand her play beyond 60 minutes, you can’t help wishing that she gave you more information about Holliday’s past than the various fragments of memory called up by the Senators’ questions.  It’s a show everyone should see both for Harris’s pitch-perfect performance as Holliday but also as a reminder of strange forces in the US that seek to quash the freedoms of belief and expression upon which the republic was founded.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Laura Anne Harris. ©2007 Véronique da Silva.

For Tickets, visit www.fringetoronto.com.