Review - The Little Foxes: A Little Family Business

Perhaps it's a sign of economic hardship continuing to plague Off-Broadway that not one drop of V-8 Vegetable Juice Cocktail is poured over the leading lady's head, nor is even one slice of watermelon smacked onto an actor's skull in Ivo van Hove's deliciously stark and chilly interpretation of Lillian Hellman's classic 1939 melodrama, The Little Foxes. The director whose proclivity for covering characters in chocolate sauce and ketchup must have done a number on the dry-cleaning budgets for New York Theatre Workshop's productions of Hedda Gabler and The Misanthrope, comes clean in this one, but don't be foolhardy enough to expect anything near a traditional mounting of this tale of greed and gender politics among the siblings of an aristocratic Southern family.

Minimalist to the point where even the Alabama accents are dropped, van Hove uses the text from Mike Nichols' 1967 Lincoln Center mounting, but sets the play in "the spring of 1990," replacing the decorative gentility of the American deep south of 1900 with the kind of trashy faux-artistic urban intellectualism that gave so many of us the giggles twenty years ago. (Just think of any fragrance commercial from that era - or automobile ad featuring Jonathan Pryce - and you'll immediately recognize the vibe.)

The drawing room of Regina Giddens - who, as a woman, had to marry for financial security while her brothers, Ben and Oscar, divided their father's inheritance - as designed by Jan Versweyveld, resembles a single-installation art gallery where, naturally, everyone ignores the single installation on display. Velvet walls of deep purple are accented by a quartet of simple white chandeliers. A thick square post, behind which is the only point for actors to enter or exit, encases the bottom of a staircase, above which, in a classic ornamentAl Gold frame, is displayed a screen where Tal Yarden's videos show us what's going on elsewhere. Inhabiting the space are characters who nearly all, as dressed by Kevin Guyer, sport sharp, chic styles of dark charcoal and black.

With no furnishings to sit on and Thibaud Delpeut's id-tickling scoring slipping in and out, the two-hour long, intermissionless evening is thick with tension and moves at a frenetic tempo. The aloof, emotional coldness of the main characters builds with heat into vicious bursts of sadistic aggression. The excellent cast is headed by one of the New York stage's dazzling diamonds, Elizabeth Marvel, as the aristocratic Regina, a woman who has learned to counter the social limits of her gender by being as ruthlessly manipulative as her self-interested brothers. When Ben (a grimly domineering Martin Csokas) and Oscar (short-fused Thomas Jay Ryan) propose a business opportunity requiring an investment from her ailing husband (a weary Christopher Evan Welch) to equally match their thirds, it sets off a power struggle of both psychological and physical violence. (Hellman already supplies the former, van Hove elevates the latter.) Marvel dives into van Hove's lion's den with searing force and mesmerizing command. While Regina, who isn't above using her daughter's sincere love to manipulate her spouse, is certainly not a sympathetic character, Marvel keeps her a tragic figure using the only survival techniques available.

She certainly has no intention of meekly accepting the status of her sex like Oscar's alcoholic wife, Birdie, cast as a hot blonde trophy wife dressed in candy apple red and played by Tina Benko with vapid girlishness; that is, when she isn't obediently accepting brutal blows from her husband and coming back for more.

As Oscar and Birdie's son, Leo, Nick Westrate shows himself prepared to carry on the ways of his father and Cristin Milioti, in an intriguingly subtle performance, shows hints of her mother's fierce independence and a touching, protective affection for her dad.

So does this high-concept, minimalist approach add new textures to The Little Foxes? Probably not. But it doesn't get in the way of Hellman's text, either. And it's exiting, visceral theatre that's, when you come right down to it, a lot of fun.

Photos by Jan Versweyveld: Top: Tina Benko and Elizabeth Marvel; Bottom: Cristin Milioti and Christopher Evan Welch.

Click here to follow Michael Dale on Twitter.