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.