27 June 2002: Hellman, The Little Foxes
The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, DC (7th and F Streets, NW)
Away from home consulting on Garrick playbills at the Folger Library, I suddenly discover “The Shakespeare Theatre” — not at the Folger, but in a theatre downtown, at 7th and F Streets, NW, and a fine production of The Little Foxes, with Elizabeth Ashley as Regina.
Ashley is some decades away from the near-sylph-like heroine of Barefoot in the Park. She has a “generous” figure now, and a commanding presence. Regina is as grasping and self-aggrandizing as they come, and so it is not surprising when she finally turns the tables on her equally mendacious but less lucky brothers Oscar and Benjamin, along with Oscar’s dull-witted son Leo, getting a few hard knocks in the school of mendacity. And her daughter Alexandra seems in some ways a dead ringer for her mother, though as yet she keeps a stiff upper lip, morally speaking, and so serves as a low-key surrogate for an audience that sees all too clearly that her elders are a poisonous bunch. Even the father she idolizes, Horace Giddens, is not above taking pleasure (the arid pleasure of a dying man, but pleasure of a sort) in visiting some vindictive punishment on his vindictive wife before he dies of a heart attack under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
It’s a credit to the sturdiness of Hellman’s dramaturgy, though no compliment to subtlety, that the play holds its audience well, if well acted. This cast is especially strong from top to bottom, and they have been expertly well directed by a director whose work I’ve not seen before, Doug Hughes. The dominant earth tones of the setting — a plush, somewhat pretentious but still comfortable, well-to-do house of middle Robber Baron style became almost metaphorical here, representing a late agrarian community looking to profit mightily from a more highly industrialized approach to picking and processing cotton. Hughes moves his actors skillfully and unobtrusively into and out of positions of dominance or subordination, using unequal zones of light and dark, made more realistic by an abundance of milky globe table lamps occasionally turned up or down or off to modify the atmosphere or to change focus or shift tension. Victorian chairs and sofas, characteristic and well-defined yet comfortable, dressed the scene well and convincingly, and the staircase — oh, the fateful staircase, on which Horace in his attempted climb to retrieve his heart medicine meets his predictable demise — is prominent enough, at the upper end of this wide parlor, beyond which a dining room appears on the other side of sliding doors, to make us suspect that it will carry a thematic as well as a multiple human load.
Hellman’s dramaturgy is in fact a little crude, leaning as it does on a double set of conventions drawn from both the well-made play and melodrama. The $88,000 of Union Pacific bonds in Horace Giddens’s safe deposit box, once mentioned, are sure to turn up — though, in