Theater
God & Mammon o Broadway
by Kevin D. Williamson
Let us begin with that most unusual of
acknowledgments: that David Frum has
written something interesting. In his super-
abundantly titled book How We Got Here:
The 70s: The Decade That Brought You Mod-
ern LifeFor Better or For Worse, he revis-
its the case of Lillian Hellman, blacklisted
Hollywood writer, Communist hanger-on,
Trotsky persecutor, freelance apologist for
the Stalin show trials, serial liar, etc. Spe-
cifically, he considers her famous remark to
the House Un-American Activities Com-
mitteeI cannot and will not cut my con-
science to fit this years fashionsand the
hearty congressional applause that followed.
Both remark and the applause were wholly
fictitious, Mr. Frum finds, as were the sto-
ries of her heroics inside Nazi Germany that
she described in her novel Julia. Julia was
nonetheless filmed and nominated for Best
Picture in 1978.
Not so long ago, 1978: It is worth keep-
ing in mind that the cultural Left kept up
its flirtation with historys most homicidal
regimes well past the point at which doing
so might have appeared merely nave, rather
than actively malicious. The litany of Hol-
lywood flirtations and literary lionization of
Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al., is long, and it is of
course by no means a thing of the past, as is
shown by the pilgrimages undertaken by the
likes of Sean Penn to kiss the feet of Hugo
Chvez, and of more significant figures, such
as Gabriel Garca Mrquez, to do obeisance
to Fidel Castro.
36 The New Criterion November 2010
Should we then be on the lookout for a
Marxist-Leninist subtext to Hellmans The
Little Foxes, recently revived at the New
York Theatre Workshop under the direction
of the voguish minimalist Ivo van Hove of
the Netherlands Toneelgroep Amsterdam?
Perhaps, though it is something of a miracle
that anything of the play gets past Mr. van
Hoves obnoxious and heavy-handed stag-
ing. The Little Foxes is a story of financial in-
trigue that since 2008 has been imbued with
that rarest and most marketable of all dra-
matic commodities: relevance. It is, like
so much of our national life in the past three
years or so, the story of a swindle: The nou-
veau riche branch of the Hubbard family, a
decadent Southern clan of some social stand-
ing, is scheming to raid the modest savings
of the nouveau relatively pauvre branch in or-
der to finance a partnership with a Chicago
industrialist that will bring cotton mills to
plantation country, thereby greatly enrich-
ing those planters who take the opportunity
to move up the value-added chain rather
than simply haul their bales north. The two
rich Hubbards are the brothers Ben (Mar-
ton Csokas) and Oscar (Thomas Jay Ryan),
who have made their fortune shortchanging
the unsophisticated black customers at their
general store and charging them usurious
rates of interest on credit purchases. The
relatively poor Hubbards are their grandiose
sister, Regina Giddens (Elizabeth Marvel in
a Fourth of July performance: predictable
explosions, regularly timed), and her invalid

husband, Horace (the stately Christopher
Evan Welch), who has been absent for some
time, convalescing from a heart condition at
a private hospital in Baltimore. The broth-
ers propose to take their sister in as the third
party in their investment, for reasons of con-
venience, pride, and, in the case of Oscar,
dynastic considerations: Hes getting short-
ed on the deal but hopes his son, Leo (the
not entirely convincing Nick Westrate), will
marry Reginas daughter Alexandra (Cris-
tin Milioti, overmatched by the histrion-
ics surrounding her), the boys first cousin,
thereby positioning him to inherit the entire
enterprise.
Regina is a familiar type, perhaps even
more familiar now than when the play was
written: The middle-class striver of perfectly
comfortable means who nonetheless is tor-
tured by her desire for more: You know
what Ive always said when people told me
we were rich? she confesses. I said I think
you should either be a nigger or a million-
aire. In between, like us, what for? One can
easily imagine the Regina of 2010, possibly
with a daughter named Alexandra (though
my money would be on Caitlyn or Sierra
or somesuch) and a very large stack of Ar-
chitectural Digest back issues, with Stickley
dreams and a Door Store budget. That there
is a remarkable material hunger at the center
of American life is undeniable: a very large
and wildly profitable industry is dedicated to
stoking that hunger and fulfilling its fanta-
sies; there is a reason The Robb Report is sold
at Wal-Mart.
Perhaps youre still getting over the ap-
pearance of the word nigger. The play
is set in 1900, in the South, and the word
comes up quite a bit. The play begins with
an interesting little bit of stage instruction:
There has been no attempt to write South-
ern dialect. It is to be understood that the
accents are Southern. That statement is not
true. It would be more accurate to say that
no attempt has been made to write South-
ern dialect for the white characters, and, in
Mr. van Hoves presentation, the accents are
not understood to be Southernthey must
be imagined to be Southern. Being Flemish,
Theater
Mr. van Hove ought to be particularly mind-
ful of linguistic subtleties, and the dramatic
uses to which they can be put. But he hasnt
made much of them, here: The contrast be-
tween the buttoned-down, largely standard
usage of the whites and the dont-know-
nothin-bout-birthin-no-babies usage of
the blacks often makes the play feel like one
more condescending Northeastern cartoon
of Southern lifewhich in part it is. Hell-
mans childhood was divided between New
Orleans and New York, and Broadway isnt
in the French Quarter.
T here is a good deal to be said for Ms. Mar-
vels performance, and a good deal to be
said against it. She is a favorite of Mr. van
Hoves, who directed her in what was appar-
ently a very avant-whatever Hedda Gabbler
and practically dotes upon her here. She is
skilled and precise, and she can produce emo-
tional fireworks like cracking an egg. Hell-
mans rather unremarkable dialogue picks
up a great deal of force debouching through
the narrows of Ms. Marvels technique. But
there is a diminishing return on raving and
ranting, as any msnbc viewer can tell you,
and the curve is a steep one. I am reminded
of Florence King describing Whitney Hous-
tons cover of the Dolly Parton classic I Will
Always Love Youall climax, no foreplay.
By the time of her final confrontations with
her brothers, husband, and daughter, Ms.
Marvel has exhausted the audience, though
she showed no sign of being exhausted her-
self. Suffice it to say that the menace of tin-
nitus was a clear and present danger.
Against Ms. Marvels maximalist perfor-
mance, Mr. van Hoves minimalism was
puzzling. The stage was carpeted, even up
the walls (and a good thing, too, for the ac-
tors who were repeatedly slammed against
them), but there was almost nothing else:
little furniture, nothing in the way of props:
an empty space. A camera, set up back stage,
projected some offstage action into a frame
positioned like a painting might have been
over a hearth. All of which would have been
fine, and perhaps even interesting, except
for the fact that a key part of the story in-
The New Criterion November 2010 37
 Theater
volves Horace, a wheelchair-bound man, be-
ing found unconscious, improbably, on the
staircase. The plots resolutionmore ac-
curate, the plots lack of resolutionhinges
upon that fact. Characters remark on the fact
that it was indeed passing strange to find a
man confined to a wheelchair at the turning
of the stair. But Horace never appears in a
wheelchair. He appears weak, frail, stum-
bling, etc., but not on wheels. A weak man
might climb the stairsor try to climb the
stairs. Finding a frail, stumbling man col-
lapsed on the stairs would indicate nothing
sinister at all: It would, in fact, indicate the
opposite. Collapsed on the stairs is exactly
where one expects to find a man in Horaces
condition. Really, if youre going to engage
in off-stage projection shenanigans and all
the rest, spring for a wheelchair.
Equally bad (probably worse) is the fact
that Regina is so grating, so vile, and so be-
reft of any redeeming quality that her come-
uppance at the plays climaxshe is scorned
by her daughterseems like hardly the sort
of thing that would matter to her at all.
Ms. Marvels Regina is precisely the sort of
woman who would be pleased to shuck her
daughter, the better to indulge herself and
the socialites life she envisions taking up. Al-
exandra is little more than an accoutrement,
the loss of which would seems to be, in Re-
ginas world, an inconvenience rather than a
tragedy.
One can see the attraction of The Little
Foxes to a contemporary audience: the long-
ings of the reasonably well-off who desire the
life of the truly rich is, if anything, an under-
explored theme in our culture, which prefers
rags-to-riches tales over riches-to-greater-
riches tales. (But really, there are so few rags
to be seen, even during the worst econ-
omy since the great depression). A
director with a bit more financial sophistica-
tion might have had some fun with the bond
shenanigans at the plots center: While the
Hubbards proposed crime is to borrow
some bonds to secure financing, our modern
naked-shorting Hubbards dont even bother
to borrow them first. Weve had some good
theater for the Great Recession and a whole
38 The New Criterion November 2010
lot of inch-deep dreck, and then weve got
The Little Foxes, which is not quite one or the
other.
T heres a fair bit of Hubbardism in Oscar
Wildes An Ideal Husband, recently put on
with The Importance of Being Earnest and
Salom for CityShows Wilde October se-
ries. But Wilde adds something important
to the mix: shame. The Hubbards are bra-
zen in their scheming: If they hold back any-
thing, it is for tactical reasons, not because
they are ashamed to reach into the worlds
recesses and extract what they want. Not so
Sir Robert Chiltern, a rich man playing the
rich mans gamepoliticsand playing it
smashingly, his life a series of successes like
pearls on a string. But Sir Robert, it turns
out, is a rat, and a rather big one: He made
his fortune and launched his political career
by selling state secrets to a politically con-
nected investor who profited by knowing
which projects the government would back
and which it would not. (Think no-bid con-
tracts for green-energy infrastructure proj-
ects in about five yearsthe play will be due
for a revival.) There is a reason that shame
is one of the all-time great literary themes:
Much of what you need to know about a
society you can learn by knowing what its
members are ashamed of. The ghosts of
the New Critics will, I trust, forgive me for
glancing just briefly beyond the stage itself
and into Wildes own life, and his encounter
with shame.
It does not take a lot of deconstructionist
wordplay to piece together that Robert Chil-
terns indiscretion while a young man might
be read as a substitute for Wildes indiscre-
tion with a young man. (Though from the
vantage point of 2010, nothing that Wilde
got up to with callow young Bosie seems
half as embarrassing as his essay The Soul
of Man under Socialism, which I recently
inflicted on myself [and recommend that
you do not], with its nattering insistence
that socialism itself will be of value simply
because it will lead to individualism. Did
Wilde never bother to learn how the social-
ists treated their poets?) An Ideal Husband

was first performed in 1895, the fateful year
that The Importance of Being Earnest would
elevate Wilde to his greatest prominence
just weeks before his encounter with the
Marquess of Queensbury would put him
on the road to The Ballad of Reading
Gaol.
The Wilde of An Ideal Husband is very
unlike the Wilde of Earnest. The Wildean
stand-in, the sweetly louche but ultimately
incorruptible Lord Goring (Arash Mokhtar),
is himself something of a moralist, and the
cheap nihilism is largely left to the ladies.
Whereas Earnest is a farce, serious questions
are in play in An Ideal Husbandthe ques-
tion of the private life vs. the public life, hon-
or, shame, and trust. Unhappily, the heavier
material of An Ideal Husband is matched by a
heavier hand on the authors part, and there
are four acts (rather than Earnests three),
which is probably one too many; Wilde
did well to heed an editors advice and cut
a quarter off his final play. Mr. Mokhtar is
a subdued Goring, a little mush-mouthed,
half-mumbling his self-deprecating one-
liners like a rather shy Groucho Marx. The
main deficit of the play, though, is Wildes:
The woman who blackmails Sir Robert,
Mrs. Chevely (Kathleen Boddington, red-
faced and arch), is a kind of paper cut-out
villainwhen the play requires her to have
financial motives, she has financial motives;
when the play requires her motives to be per-
sonal, she evolves without explanationand
the purported heroine of the story, Sir Rob-
erts steadfast wife, is a prig and a bore for
whom it is impossible to have the least bit of
sympathy, even when she is suffering. This
production attempts to overcome that struc-
tural problem by casting the charming and
sweetly maternal Taliesen Rose in the role of
Lady Chiltern, and shes very fine it in, but
Wilde just wasnt very good at writing very
admirable characters.
A word about the particular performance I
saw. Two forces are at war in me, as I imagine
they are in many critics: The first is my con-
stitutional aversion to paying anything for a
theater ticket, and the second is my constitu-
Theater
tional aversion to speaking to press agents.
Normally, the skinflint overcomes the sloth,
and arrangements are made, though I do
make a point of checking ticket prices and
asking myself how I would have enjoyed the
performance if I had been obliged to pay for
it. Not so this evening: My procrastination
got the better of me, but, for once, I was
happy to have paid the full fare, inasmuch as
the audience consisted of myself and the par-
ents of Meaghan Sloane, a lovely young ac-
tress who plays Mabel Chiltern. Even in the
Producers Clubs Grand Theaterwhich
is approximately the dimensions of my
South Bronx apartment and in a similar state
of disrepairwe were a sad little lot, and I
almost left the theater to spare the company
the indignity of performing for an audience
with nobody but mom, dad, and a critic. But
I already was intrigued by the energy and
general sense of chaos that prevailed before
opening curtain. And by the curtain itself:
That ratty red drapery, drawn across the stage
as an afterthought by a harried crewman (If
the house is open, he said, pensively and to
no one in particular, the curtain should be
closed) was insufficient to protect the dig-
nity of the company, which seemed to be
experiencing some not-entirely-welcome ex-
citement just before the stagelights came on:
not a meltdown, exactly, but something part
affable and part anxious.
They neednt have worried so much: If the
show had been a flop, there would have been
almost no one there to see it. In the event, it
was competent if imperfectly executed, and
it benefitted handsomely from the absence
of Flemish philosophers or wig-tightening
po-mo excesses. The sets may not have been
up to Wildes specifications (he went so far
as to specify Lord Gorings chambers as be-
ing an Adam roomone designed by the
eighteenth-century Scottish architects Rob-
ert and James Adam) though the costumes
showed more work and panache than many
bigger and more expensive productions can
be bothered with. It would not stand next to
a really first-rate production such as the Irish
Repertorys Ernest in Love (reviewed here in
February), but it is a show with some charm,
The New Criterion November 2010 39
 Theater
and one may portend bigger things for Ms.
Rose and her colleagues.
M urder in the Cathedral was intended to be
a portent, but it was not. It was the opening
volley in T. S. Eliots late-life project to res-
urrect the tradition of verse drama, in Eng-
lish specifically but also in European culture
more broadly. There is no way of getting
around the fact that Mr. Eliot set himself a
characteristically over-the-moon target, and
failed. His own oeuvre in the genre is thin
and incomplete: After Murder in the Ca-
thedral and The Rock, we get less ambitious
fare such as The Cocktail Party (reviewed in
The New Criterion in May) and The Fam-
ily Reunion. The Cocktail Party still has real
power, and a first-rate production of it can
be revelatory. But it undergoes a conversion
in the second half, and is duller for it. Al-
ready, its treatment of psychotherapists as a
kind of modern monastic order feels slightly
anthropological, confined to its times. It is
significant that Eliot abandoned his Swee-
ney play: One suspects that Eliot, who could
be a severe critic of his own work, under-
stood that making the various Sweeneys
and such of his own time into subjects of
universal interestto elevate their characters
into concentrations of culturewas beyond
even his formidable powers. He found real
dramatic success only in the distance of the
40 The New Criterion November 2010
past, just as the Greeks did in their myths
and as Shakespeare did in his half-legendary
histories, his imaginary foreign kingdoms
in sunny climes, and his pockets of sylvan
magic.
The performance of Murder in the Cathe-
dral by Brooklyn Arts HQ at St. Josephs
Church in Brooklyn was not to be missed.
The play all but insists on being performed
in a church, and there is something about
the venue that has a liberating effect on the-
atrical minds: Without a theater and all that
goes with a theater, directors have a chance
to think, if you will forgive the literalization
of the expression, outside the box. (It is no
accident that our churches and our theaters
are dying together, each increasingly the
property of a shrinking, self-selected caste.)
Godfrey Simmons has a kind of terrible
power as St. Thomas Becket, less afraid of
the men who have come to kill him than he
is of being betrayed by his own pride. Dave
Malloys organ-intensive score helps keep
things moving, but the director Alec Duffy
has shown himself to be clever in staging
what amounts to a very complex piece of
rhetoric as a real work of dramathe action
is tense and fast when it needs to be, while
the long monologues are never allowed to
founder. Ticket price: Zero dollars and zero
cents, way off Broadway, and one of the best
things Ive seen in months.
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