Dramaworks opens its 2017/18 season with a masterpiece, The Little Foxes, reimagined with
spellbinding staging, imaginative costumes, and impressive acting, It is an outstanding production, especially
as the director, J. Barry Lewis was unexpectedly called away for personal
reasons half way through rehearsals and Dramaworks’ Producing Artistic Director
Bill Hayes ably stepped in.
Although written in 1939 and set in 1900, The Little Foxes is as relevant today as
when written by Lillian Hellman, arguably among the greatest American
playwrights of her time, foreshadowing the great family dramas of Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller. It is set
during the waning years of the Reconstruction, the gentility of southern
aristocracy transitioning to the New South, and the advance of unrestrained,
unscrupulous capitalism of the Gilded Age.
Hellman’s work was darkened by
ten long years of a depression and the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution.
 |
|
Kathy McCafferty, Dennis Creaghan, Frank Converse, James
Andreassi, Denise Cormier, Caitlin Cohn, Taylor Anthony Miller, Photo by Samantha
Mighdoll
|
The Little Foxes
theme of unconscionable rapacity strongly resonates in our own time with
essentially a plutocracy ruling our nation. The famous quote from the play is spoken by
one of the black servants, Addie, “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.”
Director J. Barry Lewis calls that the “backbone” of the play and it is omnipresent
in this production, melodramatic in the contrasts it projects.
Two factions in the play represent those “who eat and
those who are eaten.” The former is depicted
by the Hubbard family: Oscar, who
married Birdie a member of the southern aristocracy for the sake of cotton and the
plantation, his older, shrewder brother Ben, and Birdie’s and Oscar’s loathsome
son, Leo. Oscar, Ben, and Leo form a
triumvirate of venality, and are joined -- or even outdone -- by Regina Hubbard
Giddens, their sister, who married -- with great expectations of wealth --
Horace Giddens, a banker.
The Hubbard clan is in sharp contrast to the rest of the
characters: Horace himself, who in his dying
days sees the immorality of his prior ways; the fragile and much abused Birdie,
Oscar’s wife; Alexandra, Regina and Horace’s dutiful, young daughter; and the
“downstairs” people, the black help Addie and Cal.
The Hubbards are ruthless in their dealings with the
people in their small town, especially the poor whites and the blacks who have
survived slavery. The brothers have an
investment scheme with a Chicago manufacturer, William Marshall (well played by
the veteran actor, Frank Converse, jovial, stalwart but vulnerable to Regina’s
flirtatious charms), to build a cotton mill in the area to take further advantage
of cheap southern laborers.
However, the Hubbards need more money to invest and have
to turn to Horace, who is ill and has been away at a hospital in Baltimore for
months. Regina must get the money from
her husband and will stop at nothing to get her share as well – and more --
knowing full well that he is a dying man.
Regina inveigles their daughter Alexandra to bring her father home, under
the pretense of making him more comfortable, but with only one thought in mind,
to get the money.
Once home, Horace discovers that the brothers and his
nephew have embezzled bonds from his safe deposit box for the investment, and
tells Regina he will revise his will to virtually block her from profiting as
well. Not one to be outsmarted, she uses
her knowledge of the embezzlement to blackmail her brothers.
The Hubbard family is plagued by infighting, intrigue,
and revenge. Their furtive looks on stage speak volumes. Hellman plays out their greedy machinations as
naturally as a walk down the street, almost as products of natural selection,
becoming what life intended for them. Indeed,
as Lillian Hellman said in an interview, “I merely wanted, in essence, to say:
‘Here I am representing for you the sort of person who ruins the world for us.’”
 |
| Kathy McCafferty, Denise Cormier Photo by Samantha Mighdoll |
In so “representing,” Hellman creates two of the preeminent
female roles in a single American Drama. Birdie, is played by Denise Cormier,
her PBD debut, capturing the character’s vulnerability and sad innocence. This is in stark contrast to Regina, played by
Kathy McCafferty who stalks the stage with calculating malevolence. As different as they are, they share the
commonality of women trapped in a man’s world at the turn of the century.
Birdie’s “escape” is to dream of returning to her old family
plantation, Lionnet, the way it once was, Denise Cormier channels Birdie’s
disconnection with reality: ”I'd like to see it fixed up again, the way Mama
and Papa had it. Every year it used to get a nice coat of paint-Papa was very
particular about the paint-and the lawn was so smooth all the way down to the
river, with the trims of zinnias and red- feather plush. And the figs and blue
little plums and the scuppenongs.“
 |
|
Denise Cormier, Caitlin Cohn Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
|
Yet she is also the innocent truth teller, expressing the
ugly reality about her husband’s love of shooting small animals for sport while
the blacks go hungry and are begging at the door: “It’s wicked to shoot food
just because you like to shoot, when poor people need it so.” She is an alcoholic, something she admits so
painfully to Horace, Alexandra, Cal and Addie, musing about her husband Oscar
when she was first married, “he was kind to me, then. He used to smile at me. He hasn’t smiled at
me since. Everybody knows that’s what he married me for. Everybody but me.”
Cormier’s performance is heartbreakingly ethereal and memorable, particularly
her unconditional love for her niece, Alexandra.
 |
|
Kathy McCafferty, Rob Donohoe,
Photo by Alicia
Donelan
|
The leading role of Regina is totally owned by Kathy McCafferty
who revels in Regina’s venality while still leaving the audience feeling some
empathy as she’s an ambitious woman held prisoner in a male dominated world. She was victimized by her father leaving all
the money to her brothers and then by the brothers themselves. No wonder she perceives her escape as having
what the men have, power and money. McCafferty’s
performance walks that fine line, making Regina’s actions plausible although
reprehensible.
When Horace first comes home and learns why Regina really
wanted him back, Regina’s words to Horace wound, one of the several emotional
peaks of the play. McCafferty dips her
dialogue deep in cynicism explaining why she married him in the first place:
“You were a small-town clerk then. You
haven’t changed….It took me a little while to find out I had made a
mistake. As for you – I don’t know. It was almost as if I couldn’t stand the kind
of man you were --- I used to lie there at night, praying you wouldn’t come near.
“
 |
|
James Andreassi, Dennis Creaghan
Photo by Alicia
Donelan
|
The Hubbard brothers are detestable in their own
distinctive ways. James Andreassi portrays
Oscar as a bully, abusive and dismissive of his fragile wife, and demeaning of
his odious spoiled son, Leo, played by Taylor Anthony Miller with a hang-dog
look, anxious to please with a phony smile (even his mother, Birdie, confesses
that she does not like her own son).
But Oscar is also a tool of his older brother Ben. The
PBD veteran actor, Dennis Creaghan, portrays the behind-the-scenes manipulator
as if it is just intrinsic to his personality. In an environment where duplicity and suspicion
reign, Oscar delivers a line which is central to the play, “It’s every man’s
duty to think of himself.” Yet it is Ben
who is prophetic: “The century’s
turning, the world is open. Open for people like you and me. Ready for us,
waiting for us. After all, this is just the beginning. There are hundreds of
Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country…and they will own
this country some day.” It is pragmatically
and chillingly delivered by Creaghan, prophesying today’s world.
 |
|
Denise Cormier, Rob Donohoe, Caitlin Cohn
Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
|
Horace Giddens is movingly played by Rob Donohoe, a man
whose illness has given him new insight into the errors of his former ways. Donohoe
shows the distress of knowing he is a dying man trapped in such a toxic environment
but resolute and protective of his daughter. He delivers the crushing message
to Regina explaining why he intends to redraft his will with all the repressed
fury he can muster: “Not to keep you from getting what you want. Not even
partly that I'm sick of you, sick of this house, sick of my life here. I'm sick
of your brothers and their dirty tricks to make a dime….. Why should I give you
the money? To pound the bones of this town to make dividends for you to spend?
You wreck the town, you and your brothers, you wreck the town and live on it.
Not me. Maybe it's easy for the dying to be honest. But it's not my fault I'm
dying. I'll do no more harm now. I've done enough. I'll die my own way. And
I'll do it without making the world any worse. I leave that to you.”
Their daughter Alexandra, also called Zan, is played by
the young actress who helped make last year’s Arcadia so memorable, Caitlin Cohn.
She renders Zan as an innocent idealist, yet one striving to discover
her own individuality, learning the shocking truth about her family which is rotten
to the core. She has a joyful
relationship with her Aunt Birdie and worships her father. At the end Hellman
seems to point to Zan as having the options which Birdie and Regina did not:
escaping the family altogether, a statement of female empowerment.
 |
|
Avery Sommers, Patric Robinson
Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
|
Also representing “goodness” are the two house servants,
Avery Sommers playing Addie, who is Zan’s nanny and Patric Robinson as Cal. Cal and Addie articulate a folk wisdom
throughout the play like a Greek chorus. They have borne witness to the exploitation
around them, and are victims of the Hubbard’s dismissiveness. In spite of that, both Sommers and Robinson
play their parts with an elevated dignity and supply some of the much needed
humor in the play. Sommers’ facial expressions reveal her character’s knowledge
of the family flaws and the basic humanity of Horace, Birdie, and Zan. There is
love there in a basically loveless play.
Clearly it was J. Barry Lewis’ vision to present the play
with a high degree of realism, Even though the play is in three acts with two
brief intermissions, time flies as we witness the winding and unwinding of the
plot, a real-life story in another time but it could be our own.
Costumes along with scenic design also help make this production
stand out. Michael Amico’s set is
stately and is in neutral colors, making the best of Dramaworks’ shallow but
wide stage. This becomes a perfect
palette for Brian O'Keefe’s costume designs, supplying the color of the
production. Those follow the changes in this character-driven play. Regina’s in particular are striking, at times
suggesting a seductress, a femme fatale, and of course, as her name implies,
regal. Birdie’s are designed to make her
look refined, a southern belle, and as her name implies, flighty. Zan’s bespeaks innocence and
virtuousness. It is interesting to see some
of O’Keefe’s artistic renderings before a stitch is sewn:
Kathy McCafferty sees her last costume as a “feminine
suit of armor.”
Paul Black’s lighting design had to work with “windows”
that allows daylight to come from the audience’s side of the stage. The lighting of the lively first act is
dramatically different from the high drama of the final scene. Brad Pawlak’s sound
design sets up moods mostly at the beginning and end of scenes, tapping into
classical pieces by Amy Beach, a pioneering American female composer of that
era.
It is not surprising that the play ends sadly, but
acceptance and hopefulness are also in the mix.
Dramaworks wisely leaves it open
to the audience to interpret the “winners” in this unforgettable production.
 |
| Cast Party Opening Night |
