The theme for St. Louis Actors’ Studio’s 12th season is “Blood Is Thicker than Water.” Blood is an interesting metaphor for family. Compared to water, not only is it thicker, it’s stickier. It can leave permanent stains. It clots. It carries nourishment but it also provides a pathway for various illnesses. Yeah, it’s a dandy metaphor.
And that leads us right into The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman’s play in part based on her mother’s family. John Contini directs this first offering of the season for SLAS, a good reminder that dysfunctional families weren’t a product of the last half of the twentieth century. The golden glow of the past shouldn’t allow us to overlook what great-grandma or fourth-great uncle endured.
It’s 1900 in a small town somewhere in the South. Regina Giddens (Kari Ely) is awaiting the return of her banker husband Horace (William Roth) from a long stay at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her brothers Ben (Chuck Brinkley) and Oscar Hubbard (Bob Gerchen), prosperous, avaricious merchants in town, are about to spring the ultimate big deal, landing a cotton mill in town. They’ll be investors with a Chicagoan named Marshall (Richard Lewis), and they need Horace to come through with a third of the money they need. It’s a long multi-train ride from Baltimore, where Hopkins is located, to home, but he has to be there to close the deal. Regina announces she is sending their only child Alexandra (Bridgette Bassa), perhaps 17 or 18, to fetch him home, unchaperoned. Oscar thinks if Alexandra is going to inherit from her father, who is by no means cured of his heart disease, he should marry his son Leo (Ryan Lawson-Maeske), who’s a teller at Horace’s bank, to her, cousin or not. Then there’s Oscar’s wife Birdie (Laurie McConnell), sweet and perhaps a little air-headed but totally undeserving of Oscar’s treatment of her.
Regina herself is no shrinking violet, we learn quickly, and the prospect of truly big money is almost intoxicating to her. Ely hits it out of the park with this one, looking cool while constantly thinking ahead. To call it “scheming” is to underestimate the power and quickness of her mind. It’s a strong, disciplined performance. Of her brothers, Brinkley is properly stolid. Gerchen is a wonderful and much more obvious villain. He almost slithers – except with his wife, when he coils and strikes at will. It’s impossible not to love McConnell’s Birdie, gabby and trying hard to do the right thing.
Regina’s husband Horace is so ill when he arrives home that it’s always been hard to tell if he is a strong man who’s weakened by illness or a soft guy that Regina has always had an upper hand with. Roth’s Horace shows the exhaustion of someone dealing with an illness, a man who’s had time to reflect and think. Bassa gives us Alexandra, a properly brought up young woman, as a blank slate who’s being inscribed with the lessons of realizing the world of the adults around her are not what she thought, and shows growth. Lawson-Maeske’s Leo, more interested in fast women and other leisure pursuits than in banking, not only is none too bright, his face is a wondrous map of response to his father and uncle. (In another example of why small venues are so great for theatre, watch him silently reading a newspaper. Details matter.) Wendy Greenwood is Addie, the cook and longtime pillar of the household, and an ally of Alexandra, strong and biting her tongue in a period when the N-word is thrown about as casually as it is in this script. Cal, the house man, played by Dennis Jethro II, does a lot of perfectly understandable but metaphorical eye-rolling at his employers’ family, and, in another bit of detail, exits mumbling quite wonderfully.
Contini has assembled this group and orchestrated it beautifully, helped along by Patrick Huber’s deeply Southern interior, using inference more than direct reproduction, with, for instance, old mural-like wallpaper that make me think of the early Fifties. Megan Harshaw designed the costumes, full of pleats and fabulous fabrics and hints of a bustle.
Fine acting in a classic American play from a woman who was no shrinking violet herself. We’ve gotten accustomed to obscene language and nudity onstage; if one can bear with hearing racism portrayed in all its nastiness, this is an exemplary piece of work.
The Little Foxes
through October 14
St. Louis Actors’ Studio
Gaslight Theater
360 N. Boyle
314-458-2978