Cygnet's 'Little Fox' is gleefully wicked

By: PAM KRAGEN - Staff Writer | Wednesday, November 23, 2005 7:24 AM PST ∞

Lillian Hellman's knife-edged wit has hardly dulled in the 66 years since her darkly comic family drama "The Little Foxes" debuted on Broadway. In an elegant and well-cast production at San Diego's Cygnet Theatre, "The Little Foxes" show they can still bare their tartar-free fangs with wicked glee.

Cygnet artistic director Sean Murray directs this rich staging that stars some of San Diego's best actors. Keeping the high-voltage family face-offs in this turn-of-the-century Southern tale from spilling over into melodrama requires a careful hand, and Murray balances the performances well. There's still a little too much shrill shouting for the small Cygnet space but that could've just been opening-night jitters last weekend.

Hellman based "The Little Foxes" on her own Alabama kin, and her leftist politics figured heavily in the damning portrait she paints of the play's central family, the Hubbards ---- post-Civil War carpetbaggers who'd arrived in the South decades before and risen to modest wealth through corrupt business deals and the exploited labor of former slaves.

The play opens in 1900, when a lucrative deal to build a cotton mill in the Hubbards' hometown is being sealed between a Chicago businessman and the three greedy Hubbard siblings ---- the shrewd, dirty-dealing Ben; the greedy but dim Oscar; and their icy, conniving sister, Regina. The deal is sure to make the siblings rich, but there's a fly in their mint julep. Regina says her chronically ill husband, Horace, won't put up his share of the money to close the mill deal unless he gets more than one-third share of the return. Oscar will surrender some of his share to Regina if she'll pledge her sweet-natured teenage daughter, Alexandra, to marry his lazy, whore-chasing son, Leo.

When Horace refuses to invest in the mill or consent to his daughter's engagement, Regina decides to do him in, and Ben and Oscar secretly conspire to steal Horace's money. The nasty double-crosses and manipulations continue right up until the final scene of this two-hour, 40-minute catfight. Hellman's biting dialogue is deliciously fun and the actors revel in every snarling syllable.

Rosina Reynolds revels in the juicy role of the faded belle Regina. A skirt-swirling magnolia on the outside and steel-spined fox on the inside, Reynolds' Regina will stop at nothing to claw her way to fortune. Tom Stephenson sparkles in a multilayered performance as Ben, whose genteel manners barely conceal his cruelty and avarice. The onstage relationship between Reynolds and Stephenson is electric. Even when Regina outfoxes Ben, he admires her cunning, saying: "Well, you have spirit after all. I used to think you were all sugar water."

Glynn Bedington is heartbreaking as Oscar's neglected, alcoholic wife, Birdie. She brings a fragile, frightened quality to this onetime beauty who's now shunned, abused and often publicly humiliated by the three siblings. Tim West is brutish and condescending as Oscar, the least-intelligent member of the Hubbard clan. And Michael Harvey shows his versatility as both the virile Chicago mill-builder Marshall and the weak, wheelchair-bound Horace.

Cynthia Marie Brooks is quietly noble as Regina's long-suffering but loyal maid, Addie; Rachael VanWormer embodies youthful innocence as Alexandra; Joseph Panwitz is ideally unlikeable as Oscar's son, Leo; and Tom Zohar brings comic relief as Regina's often-perplexed family servant, Cal.

Murray's excellent turn-of-the-century set is lavishly appointed and thoughtfully lit by Eric Lotze. And Jeanne Reith's period costumes are gorgeous. The production design makes "Little Foxes" just as much a treat to watch as it is to hear (though sensitive viewers should be aware of the script's use of racist epithets).

"The Little Foxes" is a smart play that delivers in every way and it makes for a nice holiday diversion. For after all, Thanksgiving is the time when dysfunctional family gatherings tend to create dinner-table chaos. For some ticket-buyers, it may be a comfort to spend a few hours this weekend with a family that's even more screwed up than their own.

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