Theater: Greedy Lot

The construction of playhouses flourishes, but the craftsmanlike hand that shapes a play is often missing. The admirable revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes at New York’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center last week mounts character in plot as snugly as a ship’s model fits in a bottle. Her saga about the greedy success of the hard-bargaining Hubbard family in the turn-of-the-century South has survived the passage of 28 years with its power to please unsapped.

Oscar Hubbard (E. G. Marshall) is a mean, vindictive half-man who vents his malice by slapping his genteel, alcoholic wife Birdie (Margaret Leighton). Oscar’s brother Ben (George C. Scott) is shrewder, abler, more sardonic. Their sister Regina (Anne Bancroft) is ambitious for wealth, power and position. The trio’s chance for the big money rests on joining a foxy Chicago manufacturer (William Prince) and sharing the costs of putting up a cotton mill. The key figure in the deal is Regina’s husband Horace (Richard A. Dysart), ill in a Baltimore hospital. She orders him brought home and badgers him to ante up their share of the capital.

Emotionally estranged from Regina and sick of the family’s vulpine itch for plunder, Horace stubbornly refuses The play reaches its melodramatic peak when Horace suffers a heart spasm and pleads pitifully for his medicine. Regina lets him die without blinking an eye lash. That scene is still as chilling a moment of theater as it was when Tallulah Bankhead played the role (her finest) in 1939.

The present production is a model of casting. Anne Bancroft’s congealed contempt, George Scott’s rasping arrogance, Margaret Leighton’s wounded bird cries—all these file on the nerves as Director Mike Nichols expertly dovetails scenes of explosive malignance. For the first time, the Beaumont Theater’s open stage does not seem to be sprawling off into infinity, as Howard Bay’s set and lighting define the Hubbard living room like the white, spare square of a prize ring.

While The Little Foxes is still stage-sturdy, its angle of vision is the leftism of the ’30s, since it assumes that the root of all evil is economic. A 1939 audience would have understood the play as an attack on predatory capitalist morality. A 1967 audience is more likely to relish it as an indictment of greed, hate, and the Just for power at anytime, in any place.