Another Part of the Forest (Peccadillo Theater Company, July 9, 2010)

 I saw Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario back in 1996, but I had never seen its 1946 prequel, Another Part of the Forest, before squeaking into the closing weekend of last night's superb production (left) by the Peccadillo Theater Company at New York City's Theatre at St. Clements.  I was fascinated by the play itself as much as the production.

While Foxes depicts the nasty infighting of the Hubbard siblings in their forties and fifties, Forest takes them back twenty years, to their young adulthood in 1880, to show us an earlier stage in the family conflicts of the wealthy Southern merchant family.  Big brother Ben is an amoral schemer, whose proclaimed disinterest in women in both plays makes me wonder if he was meant to be read as gay.  Oscar is a fool and a brute who rides with the Ku Klux Klan.  And sister Regina is moving well beyond father-daughter flirtatiousness into something that borders on incest in her practiced manipulation of her father.  (The production actually takes it a bit further than the play as written, which calls for a daughterly kiss, but does not describe it as being placed on the lips while Regina straddles her father's lap.)  

In Foxes, I was always a little torn in my response to Regina.  I despised her for her dishonesty and her indirect murder of her husband, but I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her, too, trapped in a loveless marriage with no money of her own and continually told, in effect, to shut up and be pretty and charming because that was the only way a woman could get anywhere.  That would probably make me pretty nasty and manipulative, too.  In Forest, she just sickened me with her mercenary schemes and her selfish indifference to John's desires, though I still winced a little at how callously Ben planned to marry her off for money at the end.

Mother Lavinia is deeply religious and quietly anxious almost to the point of hysteria, rather like the alcoholic Birdie in Foxes in her nervous relationship with her husband, though without Birdie's alcoholism.  And Hubbard patriarch Marcus abuses his wife while treating his sons like dogs and his daughter like a lover.  It's sickening and fascinating to watch Marcus, Ben, and Regina, brilliantly acted by the trio of Sherman Howard, Matthew Floyd Miller, and Stephanie Wright Thompson, scheme and manipulate each other while verbally leavening every cruelty with honeyed southern affection.  Howard is particularly magnificent as the casually cruel Marcus, who simultaneously despises Ben's lack of culture and admires his scheming, but the casting is very strong throughout.

Wandering into the Hubbards' orbit are cousins John and Birdie Bagtry, Southern gentry now living in poverty.  John (Christopher Kelly), whose battle flashback opens the play, is Regina's lover, but still obsessed with the Cause and with war, as signaled by the uniform trousers he wears.  Regina plans to marry him, but he wants nothing more than to go off to Brazil to fight in another war there.  Meanwhile, Birdie (Kendall Rileigh) is forced to come to the Hubbards for a loan covered by the Bagtry plantation, Lionnet, which at some point between the two plays will lead to the Hubbards taking ownership of Lionnet and marrying her to the brutal Oscar (Ben Curtis).  At the moment, however, Oscar is madly in love with a local prostitute (Ryah Nixon), whom he dreams of marrying.

Social class and its intersection with wealth are the running themes of Forest.  The Bagtrys are poor, but still plantation gentry; Marcus complains that Birdie's mother has never once acknowledged him socially.  Marcus and Lavinia came out of illiterate backwoods families, and Marcus is proud of having educated as well as enriched himself, reading Latin and Greek classics and composing music.  The Hubbard wealth, however, was built on war profiteering and possibly actual treason, which has left the family still socially ostracized fifteen years after the war's end.  Even the uneducated prostitute Laurette, whose father died at Vicksburg, considers herself socially superior to the Hubbards.  And Marcus' hard-earned culture and education have not been passed down: Oscar is virtually illiterate, Ben interested only in making money, and Regina, offered Europe and a life in Greece, can see no further than fancy clothing and Chicago society.  That's Marcus' tragedy, and the only thing that makes him the least bit sympathetic, though one suspects he has no one but himself to blame for how his children have turned out.  But it's hard to feel sorry for any of the Hubbards other than the much-abused Lavinia; for the most part, they deserve each other.

One goes to a play like this to watch unlikeable people destroy each other in Hellman's biting style, and the company and director Dan Wackerman deliver.  It's not exactly feel-good theater, but it's entirely effective at bringing Hellman's witty familial malice to life:

Marcus (to Oscar): "Well, some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.  You, by necessity."

Not relevant to this particular production but of interest to people who have seen Foxes: I did notice a few minor inconsistencies between the two plays.  I had the impression from Foxes that their father left his money to both Ben and Oscar (leaving out Regina), while Forest has Ben taking all the money through blackmail.  Likewise, it's hard to see how Birdie's mother used to throw her debutante-style parties at Lionnet, as referenced in Foxes, when twenty years earlier (when Birdie is about twenty herself) her family is already in dire financial straits.  These are minor quibbles which I probably wouldn't even have noticed if I hadn't reread Foxes on the train into the city to refresh my memory.

While I thought Joseph Spirito's set was extremely well-designed and built, I can't say the same for the costumes, which were an unfortunate mishmash of styles mostly lacking sufficient period undergarments to give them proper shape; in one unfortunate moment I could see legs and thighs silhouetted through a thin skirt lit from behind.  It was a little unclear whether they were trying for the cuirasse bodice or a sort of modest bustle silhouette, but either way it was disastrous, with mismatched draperies on an evening dress that looked like it had misplaced its bustle, a distracting one-shoulder fringed epaulette, and a sort of Christian LaCroix-style all-around pouf skirt worn over a straighter one being some of the worst horrors.  Regina's hairpieces were also noticeably mismatched in color.  A playbill acknowledgment to the Costume Collection suggests to me that they went the low-budget rental route, presumably out of necessity, though the designer's bio is also notably lacking in period productions.  If the production moves to a larger house, as Peccadillo is rumored to be seeking, perhaps it will acquire a larger budget and a coherent overall costume design.

While this production, already extended from its original run, closes tomorrow and is pretty much sold out, the play itself remains in print, and can easily be found in any good library.  Both it and Foxes are pretty good reads even unstaged.  A 1948 film version included in a minor role one Fritz Leiber, whose son and namesake would go on to become the well-known science fiction and fantasy author. 

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Comments

[Serge]

Amazingly enough, in spite of being a fan of TV's Turner Classic Movies, I've never watched William Wyler's 1941 "The Little Foxes". I'll have to catch it next time it's on.

[Serge]

Is it my imagination or do plays (and the movies based on them) tend to show those Southern families as a bit... ah... dysfunctional?

[Susan de Guardiola]

I believe the 1941 film stars Bette Davis and is supposed to be excellent.

I don't know about Southern families in particular -- Eugene O'Neill's families are not exactly bundles of joy, either -- but think about it: how interesting would it be to see or read about people who are happy and normal?

[Serge]

True. By the way, I notice that Elizabeth Taylor often wound up playing the daughter of such problematic families. Off the top of my head, there's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and especially "Suddenly Last Summer".

[Syd]

Ms. Taylor also played Regina in a revival of "The Little Foxes" that made its way to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles in late 1981. She was both gorgeous and excellent in the role. Later in the same season, the Ahmanson staged "Another Part of the Forest"; the only female lead I can find listed is Dorothy Maguire, who presumably played Lavinia, but Tovah Feldshuh played the young Regina. It made for an interesting juxtaposition that season...