November 12, 2006

Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes at ACT Theatre.

For some reason, all week before today's performance I had it in my head that Mina Loy wrote this, and thought I was in for something much different than this tight Southern drama that revolves around family, greed and capitalism at its worst.

The cast was strong, with powerful performances by Jack Willis as Ben Hubbard and Jacqueline Antaramian as Regina Hubbard.

This is the second play in a row at ACT that deals with revolutionaries: the last play was Stoppard's Travesties chronicling Joyce, Tzara and Lenin in Zurich. In Foxes, when Alexandra commits to working against the corruption caused by bottom-line cut-throats like her family in the end, she is in effect joining if not the revolution then at least the labor movement. Given Hellman's leftist leanings, this isn't so surprising; what is is how the theater-goers immediately around me chose not to grasp this aspect of the play (the final moral moment that the play has been building up to) to read it as another play about how Deep South families are dysfunctional, a la Tennessee Williams.