Marg Helgenberger (C. Stanley Photography)
Nearly 80 years ago, Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes premiered at Washington’s National Theatre in 1939. As it to returns to the District today, its themes seem as relevant as ever.
Taking place at the turn of the century in a small Alabama town, the play follows three siblings—Benjamin Hubbard (Edward Gero), Oscar Hubbard (Gregory Linington), and Regina Giddens (Marg Helgenberger)—each obsessed with securing their legacies and maintaining their financial well-being.
Benjamin and Oscar plan to invest in the construction of a cotton mill, but they need Regina to convince her stubborn, sickly husband Horace (Jack Willis) to put up some capital. Smelling her brothers’ desperation, Regina becomes the embodiment of opportunism, angling with her brothers to ensure that she can have the socialite’s life she’s always wanted. But when Horace comes home from a hospital stay in Baltimore, these best laid plans prove difficult to execute.
Hellman’s story of deceit and dysfunction has a somewhat farcical structure, but at its poisoned core it’s a haunting, cautionary tale about the American dream. Juxtaposed with our current political landscape, Hubbards’ viciousness resonates with a bitter sting. The play’s setting in a South still ravaged from the Civil War and the end of slavery speak to the systemic inequality we’re still recovering from today.
Yet there’s a fundamental issue with this production that hinders its otherwise powerful message.
Nearly every character in the show is comically reprehensible, but the majority of the cast seems to be having entirely too much fun with their thick, cartoonish Southern accents to sell their respective malice. Gero and Linington strike a good balance between comedy and severity, coming off like a Darkest Timeline Michael and Job Bluth.
But the play lives or dies on how despicable Regina becomes, and Helgenberger is not nearly menacing enough. Her Regina feels more like a run of the mill mean girl with despicable quirks than the wounded, driven manipulator the play ultimately shows her to be. Helgenberger has the tendency to lay into her comic lines too hard. At first, the family’s petty squabbling and backstabbing is funny, but by the third act, there’s very little to chuckle at, despite or perhaps because of Foghorn Leghorn vocal acrobatics that hewing ever closer to absurdity.
The production’s two standout performers are Willis, as the wheelchair-bound Horace, and Isabel Keating as Oscar’s long suffering wife Birdie. Horace is arguably the most likable figure in the narrative, but Willis imbues him with a reserved sincerity. He projects such palpable shame at being so complicit in the capitalist rat race that Benjamin and Oscar practically fetishize. Birdie begins as the play’s showy comic relief, but Keating portrays her with profound vulnerability, her entire personage the last vestige of a bygone era she can’t process the end of.
There’s a lot of heartbreak in the closing act, but The Little Foxes leaves us with Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Megan Graves) seeing through the frilly veil of bullshit her mother has had wrapped around her eyes. It offers us the fleeting notion that the next generation might be the one to break the cycle of greed and degradation, despite a century of evidence to the contrary.
The Little Foxes is at Arena Stage through October 30. Buy tickets here.
Correction: This article originally stated the incorrect theater. ‘Little Foxes’ is showing at Arena Stage, not Ford’s Theatre.
