The Little Foxes at the Shaw Festival (a review)

(June 16, 2008) What a difference a director seems to make! At the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), the cast of The Little Foxes is practically the same as the cast of Getting Married (six actors appear in both plays). (I review Getting Married in another post.) In the Shaw comedy, everything comes off like clockwork, and the fun never stops. But the Lillian Hellman drama leaves you waiting for a climax that never really comes.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

I have already complained at length about the ferocious Stalinist ideology of The Little Foxes in this post; in another I have griped about the holes in Hellman’s plot. Despite these objections, the play is a near-masterpiece. Hellman’s characters are frighteningly real, every word in the script tells, and the story builds to what ought to be a shocking denoument.

But not in this production. For the first half of the play (by far the best half) the great questions are whether Horace Gibbens is really going to come home to the nest of snakes that is the Hubbard family (his wife Regina and her brothers Ben and Oscar), and whether he will go along with the siblings’ scheme that he join them in investing $75,000 into a new cotton mill business. When Horace finally does come home, disabled in body but determined to frustrate the machinations of his wife and her brothers, the lines are drawn, and we all brace for heavy weather.

But just when you expect to be squirming in your seats and wiping your perspiring palms on your pants, this production lets you down. Laurie Paton, who is Regina, is an outstanding actress, but here she neither looks or acts like the Jezebel she is supposed to be playing; she looks too pleasant. Nor does David Jansen, as the likeable and sympathetic Horace, project the steely resolve needed for him to win the war of wills with his wife. Between these two sparks do not fly, and in their scenes together the tension does not build.

And so, at the play’s climax, we are not nearly as afraid for Horace, or for his and Regina’s uncorrupted daughter Alexandra (Krista Colosimo), or for any of the other characters, as the playwright wanted us to be. Nor, for a play with harsh political overtones, are we fearful for America, as Lillian Hellman fervently wanted us to be. As for Alexandra, who represents Hellman’s hope for revolution and a more “just” America, Ms. Colosimo is made to deliver all of Hellman’s shrill, socialist soapbox lines at the end of the play at the same high pitch.

I cannot see Peter Krantz, a Shaw Festival regular who plays Oscar Hubbard in The Little Foxes, on the stages of the Shaw Festival without a return of the visceral feelings that he aroused in those that saw him as the predatory pervert in the Shaw Festival’s production of The Coronation Voyage several years ago. My reaction is quite unfair to Mr. Krantz, and after seeing him in Getting Married as the sympathetic, comic Boxer, I thought I might have shaken this unfortunate association. But his character in The Little Foxes is every bit as repulsive as his character in The Coronation Voyage, and as Oscar Hubbard he quite undid the salutory effect of his portrayal of Boxer.

The veteran Shaw actress Sharry Flett is simply wonderful in The Little Foxes as the gentle, abused, alcoholic, but still hopeful Birdie Hubbard (Oscar’s wife). She inspires both our pity and our affection, and the scenes in which she is disrespected or worse are exquisitely rendered. The Shaw’s production is worth seeing for her performance alone. Also highly satisfactory is Lisa Codrington in the meaningful and thematically important role of Addie.

For more about the storyline of The Little Foxes, see this post. For comment on the political implications of The Little Foxes, see this post.

The Shaw Festival’s production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1943 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

The Little Foxes Don’t Add Up (comment on the Shaw Festival play)

No one expects plays to have air-tight plots. But the premise of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (currently playing at the Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and reviewed in another of my posts) is all full of holes.

As the play opens, the Hubbards (Ben Hubbard, Oscar Hubbard, and their married sister Regina Gibbens, played by Tallulah Bankhead in the original 1939 show) are planning to go into business with a business mogul from Chicago (Marshall) to build a cotton mill in their Mississippi town. They believe that a mill located so close to the cotton fields (this is 1900) will make them all rich.

Marshall is to put up the lion’s share of the money ($400,000), but has agreed to accept a mere 49 percent interest in the business. For the remaining 51 percent, the three Hubbards will put up only $225,000 (each will invest one-third of that sum, or $75,000), although they are expected to use their local political clout (and bribes, we assume) to get water rights for the mill.

So when they incorporate, Marshall will get 49 percent of the stock, and each of the Hubbards will receive 16.33 percent in return for their $75,000 investments. (Could Lillian Hellman have really thought the average theater-goer would be able to keep all these percentages and figures straight?)

As the play unfolds, the siblings are jostling for position. Ben and Oscar are nervous because Regina’s husband Horace is away in Baltimore and hasn’t yet committed to putting in their $75,000 share. Regina tells her brothers that Horace is holding out for a bigger share of the new business. Ben is agreeable, so long as it comes out of Oscar’s share, not his. A sordid tale of intra-familial extortion and blackmail unfolds.

There are two glaring problems with this storyline.

First, why would an experienced investor like Marshall agree to put so much money into an enterprise a thousand miles away from his home, in return for a mere minority interest? With business interests in Chicago and New England, Marshall won’t have much time to spend in Mississippi keeping an eye on his investment. And we know enough about the unscrupulous Hubbards to be sure they’ll take advantage of their controlling interest.

Given control of the company, the Hubbards will rape it. They’ll make all their friends and relatives highly paid vice-presidents. (In the play, Oscar is already demanding that his son Leo be “taken care of.”) They’ll make sweetheart deals with local businesses and take kickbacks.

So why would Marshall agree to let the Hubbards have 51 percent of the company, knowing that the Hubbards would surely see to it that no dividends are even paid? A shrewd man of business like Marshall would never let himself get into such a situation.

Equally implausible is the notion that any of the grasping Hubbards would ever part with $75,000 in return for a mere 16.33 percent interest in the business. The idea, of course, is that together the siblings would have a controlling interest. But the family alliance would be dangerously unstable. Any of the Hubbards could desert the family at any time for a new alliance with Marshall.

None of the Hubbards trusts any of the others. So why would Ben Hubbard, the savviest of the Hubbards, invest $75,000 knowing that it would be possible for either the treacherous Regina or Oscar to pool a 16.33 percent interest with Marshall’s 49 percent interest to give the two of them majority control? If that happened, Ben and Oscar would be squeezed out of management, and Marshall and Regina would take all the profits of the business.

None of these characters would be so naive as to enter into such a precarious business arrangement.

If I were defending Hellman against charges of a badly conceived plot, I might argue that the playwright did, indeed, expect the Hubbards to get their comeuppance (after the play ends) through Marshall’s allying with (say) Oscar to gain control of the cotton mill. (Hellman never wrote a sequel to 1939′s The Little Foxes, although she did write a pre-quel, Another Part of the Forest, produced in 1946.)

But Hellman surely never had any such thing in mind. First, she despised Marshall as much as she despised the Hubbards. Second, she made the Hubbards all equally despicable, so that a scenario in which one of the Hubbards might ultimately out-maneuver the others would undercut the moral of the play. Hellman’s plan (as explained in my earlier post) was never for these capitalist dogs to cannibalize each other, but for the masses to rise up and slaughter them all in the streets.

There is no good explanation. Perhaps Hellman simply didn’t understand the dynamics of corporate control. More likely, in her ideological zeal, she simply failed to notice that the business arrangement on which her plot turns was unrealistic.