Word: attics
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Miss Hellman is the author of The Children's Hour and Toys in the Attic...
Like a Pharaoh's tomb, the stage is stocked with the relics of a bygone life: a clutter of armoires and grandfather clocks, quaint archaic radios and phonographs, fringed lampshades and a golden harp. A man in a policeman's uniform slowly enters the attic room and sniffs the dust of decades. He walks over to the harp and plucks at a string. It is slack, jangled and flat-an omen of the theatrical evening to come...
Leland Moss's production of Toys in the Attic is a willful distortion of a medicore play. But by the mysterious calculus of such things, the distortions hide what should be hidden, muffle the play's mechanical grinding, and render it one of the finest dramas I have seen in some time...
Toys in the Attic is one of Lillian Hellman's workmanlike psychological geographies. In the New Orleans of another generation she sets two spinster sisters. Carrie Berniers, for reasons unknown, is in love with her younger brother Julian. She has, it is remarked, talked like an old maid since the age of 12. Anna, the elder sister, has taken her mother's place caring for the two younger children. Her reasons are not known...
Still, in important ways the play is a heap of Dickensian Smallweeds, each spasmodically throwing his particular pillow. That the Loeb production of Toys in the Attic does not become a series of twitches is due to Leland Moss's direction and superb acting by Nancy Cox as Anna Berniers and Shelia Russell as her sister...