Word: hellman
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Toys in the Attic. Playwright Lillian Hellman is like a small, scared Racine. Her lines flip into the mind like well-aimed darts. Her scenes stack like well-designed dishes. Unhappily, there is seldom much nourishment in them. Hellman speaks her mind brilliantly but opens her heart rarely. When the moment requires feeling, she too often offers irony; when the theme invites tragedy, she resorts to melodrama; when the problem demands experiment, she is careful to be commercial. She is exciting but not moving. She writes superbly about sex but badly about love. She creates grand characters but not real...
...Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman's real soured mayonnaise of a play about a very nasty woman, with Mercedes McCambridge. Indianapolis through July...
...bigger box-office boost by losing than by joining the 16 prizewinners. Bed & Booze. The jurors, though, were loudly upset. "Farce," cried Critic John Mason Brown. "We've had enough," said Yale Drama Professor J. W. Gassner, who recalled that when he and Brown recommended Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic in 1960, it was jettisoned for the musical Fiorello! Both jurors quit. Apparently, the play's preoccupation with bed and booze proved too much for some of the 14 Advisory Board members. "I thought it was a filthy play," said Chicago Tribune Editor William...
...stain in a washbowl. At play's end, simple-witted Bernie is out in the once pristine West shilling with a tom-tom for some once noble Indians who are now corrupt enough to con the tourists with their fabricated trinkets. This scene contains the essence of the Hellman vision of the American experience...
...satirist, Lillian Hellman can still be cuttingly observant despite the familiarity of her targets, but she lacks the moral suasion of satire that comes from being half in love with what one loathes, cherishing the sinner while hating the sin. Her transparent disgust with her characters and all their works is contagious. Technically, she borrows from Edward Albee and the theater of the absurd, but the wobbly tone of her play shows that craft will not close a gap between generations. Lillian Hellman is still an arrested child of the '30s, and of its idée fixe that...