New Play in Manhattan

The Little Foxes (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Herman Shumlin) is the season's most tense and biting drama--as tense and biting as was Playwright Hellman's The Children's Hour. From the Song of Solomon comes the title: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. . . ." Study of a rapacious Southern family on the make at the turn of the century, The Little Foxes catches the Hubbards--who by sharp bargaining and hard ways have achieved small-town prosperity--on the point of becoming heel-grinding, big-time industrialists.

Oscar Hubbard (Carl Benton Reid) is mean, tightlipped, greedy; his brother Ben (Charles Dingle) shrewder, more capable, more sardonic; their sister Regina (Tallulah Bankhead) grandly and coldly ambitious for wealth, power, position. The trio's business schemes require the financial help of Regina's dying husband; and, sick of their vulpine methods, he refuses it. Out of this deadlock springs powerful drama of intramural conspiring and double-crossing, theft and virtual murder.

Playwright Hellman describes the Hubbards as people who "eat the earth." But she has not made them all of one piece: between the crude short-changer Oscar and his greatly aspiring sister is the difference between a rat and an eagle. Not instinctive, but icily calculating, is their family sense: the same greed which divides them among themselves unites them against others. Ben Hubbard perceives they are less a family than part of a race --a race of sharp-toothed, flourishing little foxes for whom the turning century promises a world of plunder.

With such implacable people Playwright Hellman has dealt implacably, exerting against them a moral pressure to match their own immoral strength. Both the Hubbards and their playwright-inquisitor work at a pitch too relentless for real life. But it is the special nature of the theatre to raise emotions to higher power, somewhat simplifying, somewhat exaggerating, but tremendously intensifying. Playwright Hellman makes her plot crouch, coil, dart like a snake; lets her big scenes turn boldly on melodrama. Melodrama has become a word to frighten nice-nelly playwrights with; but, beyond its own power to excite, it can stir up genuine drama of character and will. Like the dramatists of a hardier day, Lillian Hellman knows this, capitalizes on it, brilliantly succeeds at it.

For Tallulah Bankhead--who, since her return from England in 1933, has floundered around in uncongenial roles--The Little Foxes offers a chance for powerful acting, and she takes it. She plays the masterful Regina with authority and insight. Herman Shumlin has directed the play in a style worthy of its significance and its star.

Few are the important women playwrights in the U. S. theatre. Comedy offers but two: nimble oldtimer Rachel Crothers (Nice People, Susan and God), witty newcomer Clare Boothe (The

Women, Kiss the Boys Good-bye). Two other women have made smart collaborators: Edna Ferber with George S. Kaufman (The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight), Bella Spewack with her husband Sam (Boy Meets Girl). At serious drama three women in their day won the Pulitzer Prize: Zona Gale for Miss Lulu Bett (19-20), Susan Glaspell for Alison's House (1931), Zoe Akins for The Old Maid (1935). But Zona

Gale is dead, and Susan Glaspell and Zoe Akins are nowadays inactive on Broadway.

Only woman writing powerful dramas on Broadway today is blonde, 33-year-old Lillian Hellman. In 1934 she burst like a bomb over Broadway with her first play, the gripping, scandalous, tragic The Children's Hour. But for years before that New Orleans-born, Manhattan-bred Playwright Hellman had piled up theatrical experience as pressagent and playreader. The Children's Hour was scarcely off on its 20-month run when Lillian Hellman was rushed to Hollywood. There she adapted such cinema hits as The Dark Angel, These Three (the movie version of The Children's Hour), Dead End. In 1936 her second play, Days to Come, opened on Broadway, got a poor press, closed.

Packed with drama and feeling, Lillian Hellman's plays meet their grim situations headon. A moralist, not a misanthrope, Playwright Hellman ferrets out evil and malice not to wallow in them but to flay them alive. Witty, sociable, personally far from stern, Lillian Hellman is happiest while lazing through an amphibian summer on an island off Connecticut, with such friends as Dorothy Parker (who suggested the title for The Little Foxes), Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Kober. But today, awake to the troubled world around her, Lillian Hellman loafs seldom. Militantly antifascist, she two years ago spent a month under bombardment visiting Loyalist Spain, returned to champion its cause all over the U. S. Her next play will be a dramatization of one of the earliest and one of the greatest of social-minded novels, Zola's Germinal.

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