Old Wine in Old Bottles

There are always new plays on Broadway, of course, but it will be a rare week when more than half the mere handful of non-musicals playing there are new, as opposed to revivals. And these revivals seldom hold out much promise of novelty, especially in the casting. Instead, productions of revived plays on the Great White Way tend to rely on the formula of old wine in old bottles, warhorse dramas starring actors we most likely know already, from the big or small screen. While we know that novelty is not an indispensable ingredient in theater, and that star power exists for a reason, it is still a fair question whether this recipe provides adequate theatrical nutrition.

The answer to the question, naturally, is: It depends. I sampled one enjoyable mess of empty calories and one more substantial treat on a recent Wednesday, watching Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes with Laura Linney, Cynthia Nixon, and Richard Thomas, in the afternoon, and Noël Coward's Present Laughter with Kevin Kline and Kate Burton and television star Cobie Smulders in the evening.

As I watched, I tried to articulate the problems that were nagging at me. What I came up with was this: These are plays written in another time for other theatergoers, preoccupied with other issues; do they speak to us? And are we over-relying on established actors?

Lillian Hellman supplied the empty calories. Her reputation has taken a tumble from heights it occupied in her heyday (she lived from 1905 to 1984). That reputation always came with a sort of asterisk for fabulation and political dissimulation. For instance, Hellman would not allow Tallulah Bankhead and the original company of The Little Foxes to do a benefit show for Finland, recently invaded by the Soviet Union. Hellman claimed she had been to Finland and "it seems like a little pro-Nazi Republic to me." In fact, Hellman had not been to Finland, and her motive for the refusal seems to have been reflexive Stalinism, plain and simple. People had always known this about her, and it took an increasing toll on her reputation. Dishonesty and totalitarian sympathies (however congenial in modern Washington) have never been popular on Broadway.

This is not to say that probity or political wisdom is necessarily required of an artist, although it tends to matter more with artists whose work has a definite political dimension, as much of Hellman's did. Take that issue out of the evaluation, however, and give due note to the fact that still her plays continue to be produced, the most recent case in point being Washington's Arena Stage, which devoted much of its 2016–17 season, including ancillary programming, to a Lillian Hellman Festival.

Has the consensus that she is not of the first rank been wrong? It is time for a reevaluation? It has recently been so asserted: Washington Post critic Peter Marks, reviewing last year's Arena Stage revival of The Little Foxes, starring Marge Helgenberger, which kicked off the festival, argued that the fact that the play "has not been judged to be quite in" the league of Death of a Salesman or A Streetcar Named Desire "is an oversight." Making allowances for the caveat that I do not admire Salesman as much as most other critics do, I found little, at least in the Broadway revival, to incline me to agree with Marks. The Little Foxes is, to be fair, a smoothly running drama with various crises for which the groundwork has been properly laid, and the dialogue is workmanlike, and the characterizations are strong. But none of this adds up to a cast-iron case for either reevaluation or revival.

What exactly is the value proposition of The Little Foxes? Well-made drama? Exposé of Southern gentility? Eruption of bitterness at the folly of life? Or just a star vehicle? I'd argue against any of these responses but the last. The play is set in "a small town in the South" in the year 1900, and concerns the efforts of three Hubbard siblings, Oscar, Ben, and Regina...