Word: hellman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman's sequel to The Little Foxes (though it takes place 20 years before the first play) continues at the Loeb, at least until tomorrow. At 8 p.m. tonight and at 5 and 9 Saturday. Tickets $5.50 and $6.50, $1 off for Harvard-affiliated people, and $3.75 for students...
...melodrama in the play seems less high-flown when you have the melodrama of the author's own life and background to refer to. When you know that Hellman had an elegant aunt who was actually a morphine addict and the lover of her black chauffeur, who so resented the large loans she had made to her husband--the one who was having an affair with a Cajun girl--that she would never communicate with him except through the medium of her son Honey (a slightly off-beat character himself, who tried to rape Hellman when she was fourteen...
...angry comedy is what seems to have been overlooked by most critics and audiences of Hellman's plays. The Little Foxes, which was written in 1939 as the first play in a Hubbard family trilogy, was a great success, but Hellman felt it had been misinterpreted, taken too seriously. In 1946, Hellman writes in Pentimento. "I believed that I could now make clear that I had meant the first play as a kind of satire. I tried to do that in Another Part of the Forest, but what I thought was funny or outrageous the critics thought straight stuff: what...
...when Laurette is not on stage giving the audience its cue to laugh at all this--which is most of the time--the humor tends to get lost in the melodrama. It isn't fair to blame the actors or the production entirely for what is, at least in Hellman's eyes, the failure of the play. The play is intended to be uneven, in the sense that it veers from comedy to tragedy, and it is often difficult for both the audience and the actors to keep up with it. As far as the acting, it calls for deft...
...Loeb's production, too, is uneven, but its unevenness is not in synch with Hellman's unevenness. Passion drowns the humor, subtlety mocks the tragedy. The mixture of farce and drama that appears with a clear, sharp brilliance in Hellman's restrained prose looks gaudy on stage. Perhaps there are some things that, even if they are true, should not be put in plays, or short stories, or any kind of fiction. In this case at least, the raw material has a compelling directness, an understated honesty that has been lost in the transition to finished product...