Word: hellman
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...apply the same sort of reasoning to the life and work of Lillian Hellman, you might be inclined to think that her play Another Part of the Forest, which is playing at the Loeb tonight through Saturday, lacks the ring of truth. Who can believe a family in which the father is an utterly heartless tyrant, artfully manipulated by his sinister Southern belle of a daughter but so resented by his sons that one of them ends up robbing him at gunpoint? This is not to say that Hellman has drawn the dialogue verbatim from her own family dinner table...
...play as a kind of roman a clef. The weak, frightened character who appears both as the mother of the Hubbard family. Lavinia, and as a neighbor named Birdie Bag try, a young flower wilting on the broken vine of old Southern aristocracy, seems to be drawn from Hellman's own mother, the former Julia Newhouse. Like Living, whose one fixed idea throughout the play is to embark on her "mission" to teach "the little colored children." Julia constantly took refuge in religion, mouthing the words to prayers or ducking into the nearest church of whatever denomination, despite the fact...
Another Part of the Forest, like Hellman's earlier play The Little Foxes, concerns the Hubbard family of Alabama, a nouveau riche, money-hungry bunch in which the strong make a practice of destroying the weak. In choosing the subject, Hellman has gone beyond her immediate roots--divided between New York and New Orleans--to the more remote history of her mother's clan, the New houses, an Alabama banking family who had moved to New Orleans and whose squabbles Hellman witnessed as a child at Sunday dinner...
...central relationship in the play is a vaguely sexual one between the strong, cruel father. Marcus, and his even stronger, even crueler daughter, Regina--who twenty years later will have taken over his role as the major destructive force in the family. Perhaps Hellman was thinking of her own close relationship with her father--it's easy to get Freudian here--whom she knew to be unfaithful to her mother, a fact which may have repelled her and attracted her at the same time. But a more obvious parallel to the Regina-Marcus affair would be the relationship Hellman...
Almost everybody who knew Carson felt that friendship with her was an act of survival. "Carson burdened everyone who got close to her," Lillian Hellman complained. "I always felt Carson was a destroyer," concluded Elizabeth Bowen. As for Carson herself, she seemed "indestructible"-in the almost despairing word of her husband Reeves McCullers (who killed himself in a Paris hotel room after 16 years of marriage...