In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review an extremely rare revival of Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come. Here’s an excerpt.
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Lillian Hellman wrote 10 plays that opened on Broadway in her lifetime. Five were box-office smashes that were subsequently turned into big-budget Hollywood movies, while two others had shorter but nonetheless respectable runs. That’s a very solid batting average for an American playwright, and even more so for a woman who was writing at a time when few other female playwrights were able to get any traction. Yet only one of her plays, “The Little Foxes,” continues to be revived with any regularity, be it on Broadway or elsewhere in America. Hence it is stop-press news that the Mint Theater, the off-Broadway troupe that specializes in “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten,” has now chosen to produce a Hellman flop, and done so with its customary flair. What’s more, “Days to Come,” which opened on Broadway in 1934, closed after a bruisingly brief run of seven performances, and only seems to have been staged once since then, turns out to be a gripping piece of storytelling…
Not only is Hellman’s second play a superior effort, but it’s all of a piece with her later work, “The Little Foxes” in particular, telling as it does the story of the Rodmans, an upper-middle-class family that is swept up against its will in the political crosscurrents of the moment. The time is the Thirties, the place a small Ohio town dominated by a factory owned by the Rodmans whose employees have gone on strike for higher wages. Henry Ellicott (Ted Deasy), the ruthless in-law who runs the factory, hires an outside firm of detectives and orders them to break the strike by any means necessary, up to and including murder. Andrew Rodman (Larry Bull), who has always seen his employees as an extension of his own family, doesn’t want to go along with Henry’s plans but lacks the strength of will to stop him. Meanwhile, Julie (Janie Brookshire), his wife, has started to suspect that Henry is making a potentially fatal mistake…
Part of what makes “Days to Come” so effective now—and led, I suspect, to its commercial failure in 1934—is that Hellman’s portrayal of Andrew and Julie is not a black-and-white political cartoon à la Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty.” They are not monsters of privilege but well-meaning liberals whose only sin is that they don’t know how to make a Depression-era factory pay its way without cutting wages to the bone….
“Days to Come” is not without flaw, of course: Hellman wasn’t yet able to smoothly entwine the disparate strands of her plot, and on occasion she indulges in the preachiness that forever after was to be her besetting sin. Nevertheless, it is as dramatically potent as any of her hits, and the Mint’s production, directed with self-effacing sureness by J.R. Sullivan, is so strong as to paper over the author’s occasional missteps…
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Read the whole thing here.
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
The eighteenth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading. In fact, Episode 18 has been available for the past few days, but I was so swamped by