Gathering Toadstools

My Mother, My Father and Me, by

Lillian Hellman, gathers up a Jewish family of toadstools to prove that modern U.S. life is poisonous. In this emetic comedy, Playwright Hellman retches over psychoanalysts, alcoholics, beatniks, sentimental Negrophiles, romanticizers of the American Indian, epicene writers, slick shysters who run homes for the aged, the eel-spined younger generation, the middle-aged materialistic middle class, the hot-and-cold war-babied economy, the affluent society, and--horror of horrors--store-bought bread. This catalogue of latter-day evils presumably calls for the wrath of Jeremiah. Unfortunately, Lillian Hellman only manages to turn bile into bilgewater.

Her Halpern clan is a family of cartoon monsters. Vulgar, egomaniacal Mama (Ruth Gordon) is a compulsive shopper with delusions of solvency. Masochistic Papa (Walter Matthau) is a corner-cutting shoe manufacturer who is going bankrupt in a paroxysm of anguish and gallows humor. Son Bernie (Anthony Holland) is a leaky, self-expressing drip, the kind that leaves a brown stain in a washbowl. At play's end, simple-witted Bernie is out in the once pristine West shilling with a tom-tom for some once noble Indians who are now corrupt enough to con the tourists with their fabricated trinkets. This scene contains the essence of the Hellman vision of the American experience.

As a satirist, Lillian Hellman can still be cuttingly observant despite the familiarity of her targets, but she lacks the moral suasion of satire that comes from being half in love with what one loathes, cherishing the sinner while hating the sin. Her transparent disgust with her characters and all their works is contagious. Technically, she borrows from Edward Albee and the theater of the absurd, but the wobbly tone of her play shows that craft will not close a gap between generations. Lillian Hellman is still an arrested child of the '30s, and of its idee fixe that the reformation of society produces a better crop of humans. When people were poor, society stunted them. When people are better off, society corrupts them. After three decades, she is still bemused by Utopia, bored by Existence, and, in T. S. Eliot's lines, "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."

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