The Little Foxes
Opening Night: September 21, 2010
Closing: October 31, 2010
Theater: NY Theatre Workshop
Acclaimed director Ivo van Hove returns to NYTW to take on one of Lillian Hellman’s most well-known plays, The Little Foxes. Van Hove’s fresh vision of this iconic play will be a study of how women of different races and classes contend with male aggression, power, and domination. Elizabeth Marvel, who has memorably collaborated with van Hove at NYTW, playing the title role of Hedda Gabler and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, will take on the role of Regina Giddens, the strong and determined woman at the center of Hellman’s web of deceit.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
September 21, 2010
The foxes have been skinned, of course. With the viscera-probing Ivo van Hove in charge, how could it be otherwise? This experimental Flemish director specializes in stripping intricately wrought classic theater characters, from Blanche DuBois to Molière’s Misanthrope, down to their naked impulses. He has now applied his scalpel to the Hubbards, the entrepreneurial Southern family of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 melodrama, “The Little Foxes.” And guess what? It turns out that beneath their mean, greedy and conniving exteriors, the Hubbards are mean, greedy and conniving.
READ THE REVIEW
September 22, 2010
If you had to sum up Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in a tweet: It’s a story about money and how to use it or how to acquire more of it through deceit and greed. If ever a play seems ripe for a revival, it’s certainly this saga of the rapacious Hubbards, Hellman’s symbols of the merchant under class clawing its way up the social ladder after the Civil War to usurp the wealth and power of top bananas. The greedy and deceitful Hubbards can easily be seen as the forbears of the financial wizards whose reckless, self-serving practices have left not just the poor blacks of the Hubbard’s small Alabama town behind , but workers and home owners all over America.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 22, 2010
Greed never goes out of style. Gordon Gekko has risen again on the big screen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," and now the rapacious Southern diva Regina Giddens has swept back onstage. Regina, the anti-heroine of Lillian Hellman’s "The Little Foxes," has been given savage new life by Elizabeth Marvel in a bold, iconoclastic revival by director Ivo van Hove.
READ THE REVIEW
September 22, 2010
No Victorian furniture or Spanish moss is in evidence in Ivo van Hove’s contemporary, ultra-stark, and decidedly brutal staging of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, playing at New York Theatre Workshop. But the show’s lack of physical trappings — the action of this potboiler unfolds within a cube of deep purple velvet where a video screen held within an ornate gold frame, a small electronic organ and four ultra-modern chandeliers are the only adornments — actually serves to put a host of powerful and fiercely committed performances in stark relief. Indeed, the viciousness of the production extends well beyond Hellman’s cutting script.
READ THE REVIEW
September 22, 2010
Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is not a great play, maybe, but it is an unstoppable bit of stage machinery, and it does have great things in it. Hellman’s abiding sin as a writer was a need to see everything in black and white, but in The Little Foxes, Tallulah Bankhead brought such charisma to the role of the murderous Regina Giddens that she complicated Hellman’s anti-capitalist intentions with an all-out star turn that became a theater legend. In a smaller corner of the play, Patricia Collinge broke hearts as Aunt Birdie, and her work was preserved for us in the 1941 film starring Bette Davis, who gave a controversial performance as Regina that some felt was too cold and controlled after Bankhead’s fireworks. The play has had an odd life since then; there were two productions at Lincoln Center, one in the 1960s with Anne Bancroft, and one fairly recently with Stockard Channing, and both were considered failures. Elizabeth Taylor made a success of it on Broadway in the early 1980s, but no one really took that very seriously. And so Hellman’s most famous play hasn’t quite had a New York revival that would revitalize or re-juice it.
READ THE REVIEW