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| Toys in the Attic Synopsis |
play reviewed by curtainup.com
Recognition and money. Both are elusive as mercury for Julian Berniers, the pivotal character of Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic. In fact, he seems to have courted failure for all of his thirty-four years letting his adoring spinster sisters bail him out from financial mishaps.
Not so for his creator. Like Julian, Hellman grew up in New Orleans but she was only twenty-nine when her first play, The Children's Hour, became the talk of Broadway, running for 691 performances. By the time she was Julian's age, she had created the Hubbards of The Little Foxes, the role model for familial dysfunction fueled by greed and malice.
While Julian Berniers never really cared for, or allowed himself to care about money and recognition, Hellman pursued both eagerly and with great success. When Toys in the Attic proved to be her last stage hit in 1960, she forged yet another lucrative career as a memoirist. Adding to her reputation as a literary figure was her fame as a political activist and the longtime lover of the mystery novelist Dashiell Hammett.
The Berkshire Theatre Festival is to be commended for choosing to give theater goers a look at Hellman's genre of well-made playwriting by way of a play which, in spite of its long and healthy run in 1960 and a movie adaptation in 1963, is less well-known and less frequently restaged than The Little Foxes. Set in Hellman's birth place Toys in the Attic is the story of Anna and Carrie Berniers, the two middle aged sisters who work at menial jobs and are united by their adoration and protectiveness of their charming but failure-prone brother Julian. The events of the drama stem from that brother's one attempt to stand on his own feet, and the siblings' interactions with each other and Julian's emotionally unstable young wife Lily and her worldly-wise mother Albertina Prine. The play contains all of Hellman's hallmarks:
A plot revolving around the problem of evil
The development of that plot through sharply drawn, perceptive characters speaking in language that is insistently and unwaveringly direct
A strong dash of melodrama and theatrical convenience to move the characters towards their inevitably tragic destinies (e.g., an overheard conversation that triggers an act of betrayal).
The evil in this instance is overpossessive, destructive love. The tragedy is in the inevitable confrontation with the fact that dreams will remain unfulfilled. As Chekhov's trio of sisters will never see Moscow again, neither will the Bernier sisters ever take their long-planned trip to Europe. What's worse, truths heretofore unspoken have made life in the dreary house they hate even more devoid of brightness.
Director John Tillinger has relied on the play to stand on its past merits, without attempting to add any new wrinkles in the interests of modernity (the exception is the scene between Mrs. Prine and her African-American lover Henry Simpson (Michael Early) which did not include a kiss in the original). Indeed the need for control at the expense of love and the effect of money on our actions and attitudes are timeless enough to support his respectful treatment. This means a realistically detailed, evocatively lit set (a resounding bravo for Jeff Cowie and Howell Binkley!) and a leisurely pace with its only concession to current practice being a division of the three acts into two parts with a single intermission. For a while this pacing tends to be painfully slow. However, as the characters reveal themselves we get caught up in the situation of sisters' genteel poverty and the return of the brother after his most recent failure (a Chicago shoe factory financed by his wife's money).
The cast assembled to bring new life to these characters is more than solid. Lizbeth MacKay, Seana Kofoed and Jeffrey Donovan live up the expectations established in performances I've seen in other plays.
Ms. MacKay last seen Off-Broadway as another low-key sister in Two-Headed is most affecting as Anna, the older sister who risks the loss of her sister Carrie's (Roxanne Hart) love by bringing the latter's incestuous longings into the open. She also breaks our heart when, bags packed to make a last-ditch and joyless attempt to finally go to Europe, she declares: "I am a woman who has no place to go, but I am going, and after a while I will ask myself why I took my mother's two children to be my own." Seana Kofoed, who gave a remarkable performances as a Scottish maid in An Experiment With An Air Pump is even more impressive as the slightly crazy and overwhelmingly needy Lily. Jeffrey Donovan, who effectively played Marco in the revival of A View From the Bridge, at times resembles the original Julian, Jason Robards, though he falls just a tad short of his character's overwhelming charm.
Debra Mooney, despite looking at least ten years older than the forty-five called for in the play's stage direction, is outstanding as Lily's somewhat enigmatic mother and the play's second most clear-eyed character. She is a marvel of dryly expressed wisdom and finely understated emotion. Ms. Hart plays Carrie as the over intense, over-the-hill steel magnolia, not afraid to be as annoying and unlovable as the playwright intended her to be.
Not a character, but nevertheless overarching everything is that old devil, MONEY. It is the toy in this attic that stirs unspoken rancors and truths. It is the means to ends that turn out not to be what was wanted all along. A misjudged pursuit of it can beg disaster. Disinterest in it is according to Mrs. Prine "a pretense the rich like to indulge in. . .a nasty game""
play reviewed by variety.com
The New England summer theater season takes an urgently needed turn for the better with the Berkshire Theater Festival's utterly assured revival of Lillian Hellman's study of family dysfunction in "Toys in the Attic." Originally seen on Broadway in 1960 with a cast led by Maureen Stapleton, Anne Revere, Irene Worth and Jason Robards Jr., the play may not be top-drawer Hellman, but it's vigorously theatrical and never less than melodramatically entertaining, with some terrific roles for a handful of actors capable of coping with them. Under the potent direction of John Tillinger, the BTF's cast makes the most of their opportunities with vivid splashes of personality and technique.
Hellman is at her most Tennessee Williams here. Set in a family home in New Orleans' (apparently in the 1930s, in this production), the play presents a pair of old-maid sisters, Carrie and Anna Berniers, rapidly nearing middle age. Their entire existence is focused on their younger, 32-year-old ne'er-do-well brother Julian.
"You are our life," they say. Until now, he has always returned home broke to be nursed and spoiled by his sisters, to whom his dependence is manna. But this time he returns with child bride Lily and $150,000. The sisters are deeply suspicious as to how he got it, and totally dismayed at losing his dependence. That the younger of the sisters, Carrie, has always harbored incestuous longings for her brother is icing on the cake.
Add the fact that Lily has a tenuous hold on sanity, that her mother has a black "chauffeur" lover, and that Julian will lose his money and be brutally beaten up, and you can see that Hellman cooked up quite a savory Southern jambalaya. On the plus side, the play is never dull and often wittily surprising. On the minus side, Hellman overexplicates her plot and themes to the point where they can become unnecessarily obvious. The play could have used one more round of editing and polishing.
Performed in a highly evocative set by Jeff Cowie that reveals both the Berniers sisters' living room and vine-covered front porch, the play comes immediately to life, warts and all.
As the two sisters, complete with helmets of marcelled hair, Lizbeth Mackay and Roxanne Hart could scarcely be better. As the older, more realistic Anna, Mackay underplays with steely poignancy. As Carrie, on the surface a fluttering Southern belle, underneath even tougher than Anna, Hart dives headfirst into Southern treacle with complete conviction.
In the tricky, but rewarding, role of emotionally fragile Lily, Seana Kofoed is equally fine and true. Debra Mooney is wonderfully at ease with her character, Lily's mother (which may be the play's most subtle role). Under such expert circumstances, the fact that Mooney looks older than her lover (played with telling dignity by Michael Early), though they're both supposed to be around 45, is virtually beside the point.
As Julian, Jeffrey Donovan may push too hard and loud for the intimate BTF Playhouse, but his bluster is entirely in character. By the play's end, when virtually everyone's life has been shattered, his beaten-and-bloodied boy-man has real pathos.
In less than ideal hands, "Toys" could lapse into a caricature of the Southern Gothic genre. That it never does is to the credit of everyone involved, including costume designer Carrie Robbins and composer Scott Killian.
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THURSDAYS
