At The Goodman Theatre in Chicago through June 7, 2015
http://www.goodmantheatre.org/littlefoxes
By David Chack
Near the beginning of The Little Foxes, the Chicago businessman William Marshall, who is
being courted by the Hubbard family for his company in opening a cotton mill,
says that he isn’t in business for any kind of high-minded values – apparently
referring to socialism or workers rights ideologies. He just wants to make
money and the Hubbards are the kind of people whom he can do that with because
they are “…partners who so closely follow the teachings of Christ.”
(L to R) Shannon Cochran
(Regina Hubbard Giddens), Michael Canavan (William Marshall), Mary Beth Fisher
(Birdie Hubbard), Dan Waller (Leo Hubbard), Dexter Zollicoffer (Cal), Steve
Pickering (Oscar Hubbard), Rae Gray (Alexandra “Zan” Giddens)
The moment is nearly a throw away. But in an insightful
direction, Henry Wishcamper the play's director, has the entire Hubbard family
pause, take in the phrase, and then go on. In so doing he creates an unspoken,
even a secret acknowledgement between the members of the Hubbard family that
they do not follow the teachings of Christ and this reflects the back-story
that is Lillian Hellman’s own Jewish family.
Jews in the South were a different breed from Jews of the
North. Acutely aware of their differences in a region that was demonstrably
Christian, they found acceptance in their stereotyped role as Jews who were
seen as necessary in matters of money and business. And in fact Hellman’s
family came from Demopolis, Alabama where the play is set, they were in
business, and they were a successful banking family. Her maternal grandmother,
who the matriarch in the play Regina Hubbard Giddens is modeled, evidently
never missed an opportunity to mock and belittle her father for his poor
business sense in front of her and her mother. (Southern Literary
Trail) (Jewish
Women’s Archives)
In using her family as models for the Hubbard family in The
Little Foxes and because she never mentions
that they are Jews, Hellman felt free to make them into the stereotyped Jewish
family that their neighbors expected them to be. They are greedy and avaricious
and Regina is so vengeful that she orchestrates an act so horrible that not
even the rest of her family can envision it.
Shannon Cochran (Regina Hubbard Giddens)
Hellman also references her
own life as a Southern Jew in the daughter of Alexandra or Zan, who breaks away
from her family at the plays end to join left-wing progressives. Many of those she joined with were Jews in New York City, also putting
Zan (aka Hellman) in the tradition of Jewish leftists.
When Hellman wrote The Little Foxes anti-Semitism was at its height in the world. In her
personal writings she has said that when she went to pre-war Nazi Germany in
the 1930s she really felt what it was like to be a Jew. Hellman felt the
darkness that was to descend on Europe and consequently on the world. In my interview with the play's director Henry Wishcamper, he told me that the anchor speech
for him was, "The people that eat the earth, are like the locusts of the Bible. And then there are those who stand around and watch them eat it.
Sometimes just standing by is as evil as doing the evil itself. They aren't
doing anything to make the world better."
For us to know the crypto-Jewish story, as well as the
events in Hellman’s time, we then see a complex and psychological portrayal in The
Little Foxes that shows a Jewish family
that has been poisoned by their “outsiderness” in the South, no matter how
successful they become. Consequently the play shows that they have become the
demons their neighbors see them as.
Wishcamper is relentless in his depiction
of this family that implodes through their need for power and also driven toward their destination of darkness. The performances are searing from the portrayals of
the Hubbards to the African-American domestic help Cal and Addie. This group of
outsiders, though on different levels of power, are all hurtling towards an end
that will drive them to the only solution, which is exile – exile from family and exile from the South.
Interestingly and even mythically Hellman brackets the evil through the play’s title The
Little Foxes, referencing The
Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. The
Song of Songs or Song of Solomon is one of the great love poems in literature. The
phrase “the little foxes” (2:15) is about how the little foxes will ruin the king and princess' vineyard of love. Many have written that this is Hellman’s metaphor for the
beauty of the South and that the Hubbards are the virulent little foxes who will
ruin it and lay it to waste.
But bearing in mind that the Hubbards are the
crypto-Jews of the South, the “little foxes” is the oppressive evil of prejudice and racism that
infiltrates the vineyard. And the vineyard is the Hubbard family itself. In other words, this place that Jewish families had hoped to have as their home and that they would make into a beautiful and intoxicating vineyard, is instead infected by prejudice born from hateful stereotypes, racism, greed,
and power. The great irony is that the Hubbard family, unlike old Mother
Hubbard of the nursery rhyme, is made into the "shylock" that their neighbors wish them to be.
The Goodman Theatre, Chicago
Through June 7, 2015
Director Henry Wishcamper
http://www.goodmantheatre.org/littlefoxes
