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June 8, 2010

If you’ve ever seen a production of “The Little Foxes” or the 1941 movie version with Bette Davis and wondered how her character, the monstrous Regina Giddens, got that way, “Another Part of the Forest” will answer that question. But you won’t see the process.

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June 8, 2010

For anyone who’s ever wondered what the venomous characters in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes might have been like when they were younger, the Peccadillo Theatre Company’s delectable revival of Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, playing at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, provides some answers. The play, originally produced some seven years after the success of Foxes, may not be as assured as its predecessor, but it is, nonetheless, a satisfying potboiler, served up with zest in director Dan Wackerman’s generally taut staging.

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Curtain Up
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Elyse
Sommer

June 7, 2010

Most of us know the morally corrupt, rapacious Hubbard clan from the 1941 golden oldie film version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes. The role of the family’s best known, viper-in-chief, Regina Giddens, was originated by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway, and Bette Davis on screen.

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Backstage
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Erik
Haagensen

June 7, 2010

Lillian Hellman should have listened to Mary Poppins. "I never explain anything," proclaimed P.L. Travers’ famous nanny. Nevertheless, in 1946 Hellman decided to write a prequel to her 1939 Broadway hit, "The Little Foxes," which introduced the rapacious Hubbard clan. "Another Part of the Forest" was intended to explain how this greedy, grasping Southern family got that way. The show was a middling hit (182 performances, versus 410 for "Foxes"), enough to generate a 1948 film version, but received decidedly mixed notices. Brooks Atkinson complained in The New York Times that "Forest" "went over the line, into old-fashioned melodrama." Alas, he was right. Though Peccadillo Theater Company gives it a game go, director Dan Wackerman and his largely solid if unspectacular cast can’t compensate for Hellmann’s schematically plotted, two-dimensional script.

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June 8, 2010

In September at New York Theatre Workshop, Ivo van Hove will direct a revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Marvel as the poisonous Regina Hubbard Giddens: a Southern belladonna in a garden of sibling greed. We can’t wait to see it. But as wait we must, we could do worse than to spend an evening at Peccadillo Theater Company’s competent revival of Hellman’s 1946 prequel to The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, which digs at the rotten roots of the Hubbard family tree.

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