Word: hellman
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Toys in the Attic (by Lillian Hellman) slaps a slumped, lethargic theatrical season into awareness. The reason is not just that Toys has a sense of tautness, insight and power; it also has a pervasive sense of playwriting. It constitutes a dramatic journey, with a destination, rather than a mere series of vivid theatrical way stations. And it so clearly reaches its destination that its finest moments are its concluding ones. This alone is outstanding in a Broadway theater world that, even when it knows where it is going, too often about-faces when it gets there...
...play has its weak points: by becoming melodramatic, the action seems a little too manipulated, and it is intricate and talky in getting under way. But even then it is an action in the service of a theme. Playwright Hellman's old mordant power is in evidence again and again, but Toys combines it with a broadened sense of humanity. Always sharp at characterization, the author of The Little Foxes has become more probing and wide-ranging about character. She has passed from human greed to something at times no prettier but much more universalizing: human need...
Toys in the Attic, by Lillian Hellman in a Tennessee Williams vein, had Boston audiences/coughing and ho-humming through a talky first act, but soon caught their attention with enough incest, adultery, miscegenation and fornication to keep a three-toed sloth awake for a month. Starring Maureen Stapleton, Irene Worth and Jason Robards Jr.., it is the first original play in nine years by Dramatist Hellman (The Little Foxes, The Children's Hour). Wrote the Boston Record's Elliot Norton: "She has written wisely, often wittily, and her point of view is provocative. But the basic story seemed...
...Living Theater), called the play "ferment in the armpit of society." The New York Times called it "a farrago of dirt." But Critic Henry Hewes of the Saturday Review decided that it is "the most original piece of new American playwriting in a long, long time." Playwright Lillian Hellman said it is "the only play I've been able to sit through for years...
Holiday for Harp (The Daphne Hellman Quartet; Harmony LP). Harpist Hellman produces some stunning sonorities with an instrument bred to less exotic climes. With the sound sometimes brittle and percussive, sometimes cobwebby soft, Harpist Hellman and her helpers (bass, guitar and drums) swing with sinuous brilliance through Summertime, Swingin' Shepherd Blues, Down the Road a Piece, giving each a fine crystalline gloss...