Theater Review: Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

The revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama The Little Foxes that last month concluded a 3 1/2-week run at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey was a perfect meeting of magic and moment. Not only did the production come together in the best kind of theatrical alchemy—with a cast uniformly acting with skill and conviction—but it arrived at a time when Hellman’s acerbic observations on American capitalism as a vast, destructive force have gained renewed currency.

When the festival’s director, Bonnie Monte, began planning the current season over a year ago, some clouds had gathered on Wall Street, but the American economy had not yet experienced its fall tsunami, nor had the Bernard Madoff case astonished the world.

Line after line from the play, written toward the end of the Great Depression, elicited knowing nods from the audience at the matinee performance I attended.

Before I go any further, a word about the company itself:

Running from spring to December, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey operates on the arcadian campus of Drew University in Madison, N.J. Now in its 47th season, it does not, despite its name, subsist entirely on the Bard, but instead supplements the Bard with other carefully chosen plays such as this season’s The School for Wives (the Moliere comedy now playing), Noises Off (Michael Frayn) and The Grapes of Wrath (Frank Galanti’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel).

Previously, I’d seen Richard III and King Lear (the latter reviewed in a post last year) at the festival. To date, I have yet to see a production that has disappointed me. Neither did this one, under the adroit handling of director Matthew Arbour.

Hellman’s memoir trilogy, we now know, was filled with cunning little evasions of the truth, but this drama benefits from cunning of a different kind: a theater professional’s solid craftsmanship. In its way, it is far smoother agitprop than, for instance, Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. At the heart of the play is a character study only partially dependent on the ostensible post-Civil War milieu.

One wonders if Hellman influenced a later scenarist of leftist sympathies, Oliver Stone. Like the latter’s Platoon, The Little Foxes becomes, in effect, a battleground for the mind, heart and conscience of a younger generation.

The Little Foxes lends itself well to the festival’s 300-seat main venue, the F.M. Kirby Stage. Several of the drama’s most revealing moments depend on the dichotomy between an observer and the action occurring elsewhere on the set—something that the stage, molded under the watchful eye of set designer Scott Bradley, accommodates well. These observers act, if you will, like foxes waiting to swoop down on their prey.

In the New South of the post-Civil War era, rapacity replaces gentility and racism runs rampant. Or, as the senior Hubbard sibling, Ben, tells a Northern financier who’s come south about a prospective deal, describing what has happened to the antebellum plantation aristocrats: “Twenty years ago we took over their lands, their cotton and their daughters.”

By the end of the first act, the central plot point has come into focus: Whether Ben’s brother-in-law, sickly banker Horace Giddens, will accept the offer to come in as a one-third partner in the steel mill deal concocted by wife Regina and her brothers Ben and Oscar Hubbard. Another issue—not unrelated to the first—is why Horace hasn’t returned home sooner from his hospital stay in Baltimore.

Regina spells out her limited options in more piquant detail when she says, in the play’s foremost acknowledgement of the deeply racist elements of the Deep South, “I think you should either be a nigger or a millionaire. In between, like us, what for?” Had she ever longed for a third choice besides these, she need only look at the fate of her sister-in-law Birdie, a Blanche DuBois-type figure of broken gentility, shaky self-esteem and alcoholic tendencies.

Nostrums are trotted out to justify the Hubbards’ deep-boned selfishness, several of which belong alongside Gordon Gekko’s “greed, for want of a better word, is good” in Stone’s Wall Street:

* “It’s every man’s duty to think of himself.”
* “God forgives those who invent what they need.”
* “The rich don’t have to be subtle.”

Half the fun of The Little Foxes resides in appreciating the differences in temperament among the Hubbards, even as they share an overweening desire to accumulate. One senses Hellman’s fascination with the family, for this is the only one of her plays to inspire a companion drama, the prequel Another Part of the Forest.

The Little Foxes, despite its title, is not really an ensemble piece, but crucially dependent on the actress who plays Regina. In Kathryn Meisle, they have a quietly magnetic center—not one of the prior scenery-chewing Reginas of stage (Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor, and Stockard Channing) or screen (Bette Davis), but one with her own subtle take on the material—as a woman hemmed in by her brothers since childhood, now bound and determined to make her way in a masculine world. Scarlett O’Hara, another attractive Dixie survivor, has nothing on her.
Meisle was matched well with Phillip Goodwin, investing Ben with a white-haired, wry presence that made him a Southern counterpart to John Huston’s evil Noah Cross in Chinatown, as well as with Brian Dykstra, who extracted every bit of Oscar’s blustering bullying of wife and son. And Deanne Lorette was heartbreaking as Birdie.

And, as African-American maid Addie, Venida Evans got to deliver, with assured dignity, the speech on which the entire play may hinge: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.” In her self-possessed, dignified reading of the lines, she delivered not just Hellman’s rallying cry against capitalism but also the first tentative stirrings of the civil-rights movement.

In an enlightening post-show discussion period, Bonnie Monte and the cast offered their takes on the relevance of the play for our time, their views of their characters, and other tidbits related to the production (e.g., Monette noted that the production did its part in the cause of sustainability, with 65% of materials used being recycled from other shows).

I was also fascinated by how the actors approached this play in which so many of the characters are drawn in such dark tones. Dykstra disputed the implication in my question in the post-show period that it might be difficult to find the humanity in the characters. On the contrary, he said, one of the fascinating aspects of the play was the sheer delight that Regina and her brothers took in one-upping each other. It was like a game for them, something that energized them, he noted.

Theater Review: "King Lear," at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey

With less than a week before it closes, I urge my faithful readers to hie thee down—pronto!—to Madison, N.J., for the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey's (STNJ) no-nonsense production of William Shakespeare's King Lear.

I first visited STNJ nearly two years ago, for a laudable version of Richard III directed by Vivienne Benesch. Ever since then, I’ve ached to return. Last weekend, when the chance presented itself, I pounced, and was not disappointed.

If you’ve never visited STNJ, it’s on the campus of Drew University. The sylvan surroundings in which the ivied buildings encourage the delightful illusion that you’ve stumbled into The Bard’s Forest of Arden.

As with Richard III, however, I saw King Lear on the festival’s main stage, the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater, an intimate setting where you’re never too far too see the action or hear the actors. Now in its 10th season as an adaptive reuse of an old gymnasium, the theater promises to get many more good seasons in, if the theater's management maintains its sure grip on audiences.

The current offering, King Lear, is not a sublime version of The Bard's arguable zenith as tragedian (the prime example, for my money, is the 1984 TV adaptation with Laurence Olivier, Diana Rigg, and Colin Blakely), but neither does it take the monstrously wrongheaded approach to Shakespeare memorably sent up by Richard Dreyfuss in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl. (You remember—Richard III played by Richard Dreyfuss as a lisping, limping, flaming queen rather than the usual grinning villain. Thank God Paul Mullins didn’t try this in the production I saw!)

What STNJ has done, under the accomplished helmsmanship of artistic director Bonnie J. Monte, is reason itself for celebration: Highlight, without nonsense weighing like barnacles, the major themes in the script—and, in the commanding performance of Daniel Davis, a Lear who, for all his foolish cantankerousness, remains every inch a king.

If your cultural tastes run more to sitcom than to classic theater, you're likely to recognize Davis from his six seasons as Niles the Butler on The Nanny. (Question: Why has TV taken to calling persnickety males “Niles”? Just asking.)

More’s the pity if that’s how you remember him, since the 62-year-old actor has appeared in all but six of Shakespeare’s play. The experience of watching him on Fran Drescher’s show won't prepare you for his turn here as the First Angry Man—the monarch who sent his kingdom hurtling toward a chaotic civil war with a mad plan to divide up his kingdom among his daughters, following a can-you-top-this contest in which he urges each daughter in turn express just how much she loves him.

Nowadays, I'm afraid you have to venture over to the Mideast (if you dare) to find a people with firsthand experience of how a hereditary ruler's caprice can rend a nation. In the West, where democracies or toothless constitutional monarchies hold sway, the closest equivalent to this situation would be the CEO of a family-run corporation who, anxious to enjoy sunny days in Florida, steps down—only to come charging back when he can’t stand how his handpicked successor is ruining the company and/or taking it in directions he doesn’t approve.

This sociopolitical element of Elizabethan-Stuart England has been lost, but the people of the West, facing the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries, might find parallels in how to confront a radical evil born of resentment. They need only look at Shakespeare’s expert subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester, his legitimate son Edgar and his illegitimate one, Edmund.

Just as Gloucester and Edgar cannot credit until it’s almost too late that Edmund could turn on them, so the West has had all too much experience with dictators who use the Big Lie to attain power. Decent to a fault, Gloucester and Edmund are also frequently ineffectual in stopping the spread of this virus of power-grabbing and violence.

In this production, however, audiences will identify—perhaps even more powerfully now, in societies where longevity has increasingly stretched—with families flummoxed and split by the growing frailty of a parent. You will not be staggered by the evil perpetrated by Goneril, Regan and Edmund here, as in other productions—the cast members who bring them to life (Krisite Dale Sanders, Victoria Mack, and Marcus Dean Fuller) make them as familiar to us as the roiling emotions on display in so many American homes every Thanksgiving meal.

Cordelia (played endearingly by Erin Partin) enters smiling, her arm hooked in her father’s and singing softly to him. No doubt this is Daddy’s Little Girl—which makes it all the more shocking when she takes umbrage at the vanity contest for his benefit that her father is conducting. The ensuing conversation between Goneril and Regan is staged fast and sotto voce, but with all kinds of clues that previous confusion about their father’s quirks is crystallizing into recognition that he’s not the man—or powerful overlord—he once was.

It helps to have a Lear of simultaneous strength and complexity who can galvanize the plot, and this company has one in Davis. Watch in particular the Act II confrontation with Goneril and Regan, a progression from “I may go mad” to “I will go mad.” Listen to the dignified, proud reading of the “O, reason not the need” speech that accomplishes the gradual shift in audience reaction to his character from annoyance to empathy; watch how Davis clutches his arm to suggest the medical problems that might be undermining the strength and position of this once-vigorous monarch; and catch his weary trudge offstage, when he understands fully how much he has lost, politically and personally.

Especially, marvel at his final scene, when he transports the production, as his character lifts Cordelia’s corpse, to another emotional plane entirely, with a bellow of sorrow that is not merely moving but shattering. The whole unmannered but distinctive effect reminds me of Katharine Hepburn’s description of Spencer Tracy’s acting style: "He was a baked potato: solid, and you can have them without salt and pepper or butter.”

Mention should also be made here of several other noteworthy aspects of this production:

* With his blond hairdo, Matt Bradford Sullivan plays Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, like an aging Draco Malfoy, spoiled by access to privilege, with an unhealthy propensity to grasp even more power.

* As the Earl of Kent, Ames Adamson delivers an onstage acting lesson in how to milk one speech—the dressing-down of Goneril’s toadying servant Oswald—in a manner that the playwright himself would undoubtedly applaud if he could: blunt, vigorous, fiercely loyal, the kind of friend you’d want in a fight for your life.

* Steven Rosen’s exemplary lighting scheme grows darker as the play progresses, paralleling the increasingly harsh universe in which Lear finds himself at bay.

* Ms. Monte’s triumph is to present a real case of “shock and awe” onstage—our stunned recognition of losses that have occurred in this regression from a kingdom of order to a Hobbesian state of nature, and our renewed reverence for the forces of love and loyalty that light, however uncertainly, an increasingly bleak world.