After the thievery, the blackmail, the sibling rivalry, the murderous negligence and the cruel wife-slapping, the overriding impulse that drives Lillian Hellman's 1939 melodrama "The Little Foxes" is greed. It may be veiled in dainty Victorian manners, rustling silks and grandiose millinery. But when it lifts its tiny little head in the splendid new production at Marietta's Theatre in the Square, it reveals a lethal instinct as plain as a snake.
This psychotic passion for more -- more money, more fine things, more freedom -- is what motivates Regina Hubbard Giddens, Hellman's archetype of mean. Created by a dramatist who was apparently no cupcake herself, Regina has been the scenery-gnawing property of Tallulah Bankhead (stage), Bette Davis (film) and now Jessica Phelps West, an Atlanta actress who seems to have an intuitive grasp of the coldly calculating, all-devouring Southern female.
It’s 1900, and the Hubbard clan -- including Regina’s brothers Oscar (Peter Thomasson) and Benjamin (Clayton Landey) -- is about to strike a deal with a Yankee businessman. They want to build a cotton gin in the small Southern town where they have grown the snow-white cash commodity and swindled poor blacks for years. But the Hubbards need resources, and Regina's husband, Horace (Ric Reitz), has conveniently left behind a stash of valuable bonds while his health fades at a Baltimore hospital.
In “The Little Foxes,” there are good people, bad people and little in between. Regina, who was left out of her father’s will and can't get over it, leads the evil pack. The apotheosis of kindness and culture is Oscar’s wife, Bertie (the wonderful Mary Lynn Owen), who was robbed of her own plantation inheritance -- not to mention her dignity -- by her mercenary and abusive husband. Bertie’s tenderness, and tipsy revelations, are the grace notes of this withering drama, which also features the wise family maid Addie (Donna Biscoe in regal form); Regina’s daughter, Alexandra (Galen Crawley as a sweetly affecting daddy’s girl); and Bertie and Oscar’s son, Leo (Jeff Edgerton), who becomes a pawn in the family’s game of deceit and corruption. While Landey gives a sterling performance as a Southern aristocrat, Edgerton’s take on Leo seems a tad boyish and meek for this part.
Being an old-fashioned three-act drama, “Foxes” clocks in at a good 2½ hours and is expertly directed by Fred Chappell. Alan Yeong’s costumes are appropriately grand, garish, frumpy and comic (see Bertie's poignant “wrapper”). F. Elaine Williams envisions Regina’s parlor as a high Victorian shrine of delicate settees, stained glass and prissy formality.
When Regina props her feet up on the coffee table after the exit of Yankee investor William Marshall (Frank Roberts) and begins to talk with her mouth full of grapes, the delicious vulgarity of the story starts to sink in.
Hellman lifted her title from the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” Getting her cues from Ibsen and Strindberg, she knew a bit about Hollywood potboilers, too. "Foxes" is not a masterpiece, but as an enduring study of human venality, it holds up astonishingly well.
Theatre in the Square has delivered one of the ripest and juiciest entertainments of the Atlanta theater season.
Theater review
“The Little Foxes”
Grade: A
8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays. 10 a.m. March 30 and 2:30 p.m. April 6. Through April 10. $20-$33. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369, theatreinthesquare.com.
Bottom line: Juicy good.
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