The Little Foxes -- Avarice and Malice Erupt in Dramaworks’ Skillful Production

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

To Tax or Not To Tax, A Question Again

It’s interesting what issues home-town papers latch onto.  The headline of today’s Palm Beach Post chose to focus on Trump’s tax cut “plan. ” Write a blog such as this long enough and like a leitmotif in a novel the same issues seem to recycle.  Here we go again, trickle-down economics in the form of tax cuts that will benefit, mostly, the rich and the uber–rich. 

I’ve touched upon economic inequality some two dozen times, including the impact of removing the so called “death tax,” notwithstanding Trump’s disingenuous “not good for me, believe me.” Removing this tax entirely encourages family dynasties, which in this competitive world leaves those who have to begin their journey at the starting line way behind.  An argument that is made for removing the tax is it is a disincentive for working hard.  Warren Buffett doesn’t think so and neither do the entrepreneurs of the world, people whose creativity and ideas drive their lives.  Did Steve Jobs do what he did with the hope there would be no estate tax?  The other argument is that some farmers who have vast land holdings upon death owe taxes on the appraised value.  So, perhaps working farms should be exempt up to a certain amount.

I explained my position in two articles in particular, both written more than six years ago.  We are back to this prestidigitation again and as they are as valid as when they were written, I reprint them here. 

 

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

A Taxing Question

How rich is too rich? Actually, I published a book by that title almost twenty years ago and some of its ideas are as relevant today as it was then (How Rich Is Too Rich; Income and Wealth in America by Herbert Inhaber and Sidney Carroll: Praeger, 1992). Two points from that book stuck with me. First, there is the very descriptive opening chapter of looking at income distribution as an imaginary "sixty minute grand parade," tax payers being the marchers, grouped by their height which would be representative of their incomes, the first marchers having the lowest income and the last the highest, with "height" determined by the "average" taxable income being equal to the "average" height of an individual American. The "parade" in effect is an X/Y graph, the Y axis being the income (height), and the X axis being the minutes of the "parade." The first few minutes one sees no marchers even though we can hear some noise. These are people with negative height, those who report the loss of money in that taxable year. It isn't until about ten minutes into the parade that we see marchers between 10 and 24 inches in height and it isn't until 36 minutes we see the so called "average height" taxpayer march by. With about only 20 minutes left, heights begin to rise dramatically. With the last five minutes giants appear, people whose heads are so high we can hardly make out their faces without binoculars. The marchers in the very last minute of the parade are so tall we can only see their feet. These are people of accumulated, sometimes inherited, wealth and in the last few seconds the marchers are the size of sky scrapers. In effect, the parade shows a slowly rising gradient until the far right of the curve when it begins a parabolic rise and then shoots straight up off the graph.

While the numbers might have changed over the last twenty years, the concept has not. Probably, if anything, the "parade" has become even more dramatic, more parabolic, with a steeper rise at the end. And, those at the end of the parade pay now less as a percentage of their income to the government than at any time before.

To listen to the Tea Partiers, a roll back of taxes of the very wealthiest to pre-Bush rates, is an evil, evil thing. Just think of the trickle-down effect that would be lost to the little folk who stand in line for the crumbs falling from the tables of the fabulously wealthy. It is ironic that these dire warnings of the effects of a tax increase on the wealthy are carried into battle on banners hoisted by "Joe the Plumbers" -- it shows the power of the conservative media and the most virulent impact of the Internet. It just makes no sense that the people near the middle of the parade should become pawns for the people at the very end.

Actually, I think the converse is true: it is an evil thing for people who have benefitted from being able to accumulate wealth in the greatest of all capitalist democracies, not to give back more for that opportunity. The argument goes that asking these people to pay more will remove the incentive for them to work, and maybe if we're talking about 70 percent of one's income that might be true. But in 2000, people reporting AGIs of more than $1 million paid 28% of their income as taxes vs. 23% five years later. In 2005 there were 304,000 households reporting income of more than $1 million, more than a trillion dollars of income or $3.375 million per household. And mind you of those, there are a few at the very end of the "parade" with incomes that have so many zeros they would be hard to read. The latter are sports stars, entertainers, and, of course, very, very successful entrepreneurs. Are they going to work "less hard" by paying an additional five percent overall? That five percent would mean another $50 billion going to the US Treasury, at least a beginning to address the ongoing deficit. And, of course, if you look at the $250,000 level as the cut off as suggested by President Obama, there is much more to be gleaned, but given the midterm elections, that level is probably going to be raised if it is not eliminated altogether.

The alternatives that are occasionally pushed by the Tea crowd, such as a flat tax, is, in effect, a regressive tax, with the lower income people having to pay the same taxes on necessities as the wealthy, which just further splits the great economic divide in this country. A national sales tax does the same thing and as we are now so dependent on consumer spending, that could be the death knell for the economy. No, a progressive tax structure has been this country's basis for supporting it's national programs and we have been able to grow in spite of these supposed "disincentives" of higher taxes at a higher bracket.

No doubt the current tax structure is hopelessly and needlessly complicated and THAT is where the discussion should also be focused. There are so many loopholes, that a revised graduated tax structure would not have much teeth without addressing those as well. And then there is the issue of capital gains and dividends. We certainly want to encourage taxpayers to reinvest in our equity markets.

The other point I never forgot from that book was its commentary on the estate tax, arguing against the estate tax altogether, provided there was an alternative system of "estate dispersion." Rather than taxing one's estate at death, it suggested a tax-free dispersement up to a certain level per recipient (rather than per estate). For argument's sake, call that $1 million per recipient. Amounts exceeding that would begin to be taxed on some kind of graduated basis. Those would be life time totals, so if an individual receives money from different inheritances, they would be accumulated and taxed on that scale. "No longer would the estate tax system generate an American royalty -- those freed from the need ever to be economically productive. This alternative system would generate for all the incentive that most of us have in the outcome of our own economic lives. No longer would a large part of our national wealth be beyond responsive use."

Now, the incredibly wealthy could give a million dollars each to a thousand different people, all tax free (if those recipients also received no other inheritances in their lifetimes). The point is that those thousand people would put that capital to work, rather than vesting a billion dollars in one's immediate family who might decide to simply live off the income and pass it on to the next generation, and the next. Or he/she could still leave more to the immediate family, but it would be subject to taxation, perhaps substantial taxation on a graduated basis.

"Wealth great enough to entitle one to membership in the elite comes from two sources -- enormous earnings or inheritance. Prudent public policy should allow those, who, through individual ingenuity, talent, or luck, gain a fortune to use and enjoy it for life...but if these individuals have the power to transmit immense wealth to others after death...they can write the rules controlling this wealth, possibly many generations into the future. This breaks the chain of personal effort that is tightly bound, for most of us, to personal reward. Economic resources, controlled by rules set up by the dead, are denied to those who might well be more productive."

If the Republicans and Tea Partiers interpret their gains to mean they now have carte blanche to keep the Bush tax cuts for the highest wealth tier -- people who would not be hurt by some roll back to pre-Bush tax levels -- the result will only increase the deficit further. There would seem to be no upside to such an action; in effect it is a spending initiative something they claim to condemn. Failure to make tax reforms that lead to a more graduated income tax and closing loopholes, and not having a sensible inheritance tax also just further drives a stake between the haves and the have-nots.

 

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Do You Hear the People Sing?

About a year ago I likened the US income distribution to a "parade," the wealthiest appearing only at the very end, demonstrating the parabolic nature of great wealth at the very extreme of the income curve. I was wondering when, finally, the middle class would wake up to this growing disparity and do something about it. Finally, the "Occupation of Wall Street" movement takes up the cause, hopefully all by non violent means.

At the time I said "to listen to the Tea Partiers, a roll back of taxes of the very wealthiest to pre-Bush rates, is an evil, evil thing. Just think of the trickle-down effect that would be lost to the little folk who stand in line for the crumbs falling from the tables of the fabulously wealthy. It is ironic that these dire warnings of the effects of a tax increase on the wealthy are carried into battle on banners hoisted by 'Joe the Plumbers' -- it shows the power of the conservative media and the most virulent impact of the Internet. It just makes no sense that the people near the middle of the parade should become pawns for the people at the very end."

It is sad that Steve Jobs should pass away at this time. I think of him not only as a visionary technology and marketing genius, but as the greatest entrepreneur the world has ever known. The grass root movements of today, such as Occupation of Wall Street, would not be possible without the mobile devices he had a key part in developing and popularizing. I feel a personal loss of his passing at such an early age, and of the same terrible disease that took my father. And I wonder, if we did have a fairer graduated tax structure, one that would have rolled back the Bush tax cuts, would he have worked any less hard? The "don't-tax-the-job-creator" crowd might so argue.

Steve Jobs worked as he did because it was his passion. Entrepreneurs work with a creative obsession that is not going to be railroaded by a higher incremental tax rate. They are the job creators, not the legions of corporate and banking types, raking it in, paying a lesser portion of their income in taxes than a dozen years ago when the US actually had a balanced budget, CEOs now being paid unspeakable multiples of the average income of workers in the same company. Are higher incremental tax rates and the closing of loopholes the only solutions to the deficit? No, but it's a beginning. And that, as well holding these people accountable for any fiscal malfeasance, is what the growing Occupation movement is all about, the middle class finally awakening to the issue of their being used as puppets by political ideologists.

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again!

...............Les Misérables, the musical