The Vortex is back with the South again, as politely Machiavellian as ever.
“The Little Foxes,” by Lillian Hellman, tells the story of a wealthy, but poignantly non-aristocratic southern family that falls victim to their own destructive methods that they created with their greedy success. Characters range from innocent and tragic to unapologetic, pure evil.
The set is one of the most impressive seen at the Vortex Theatre in some time. The audience is held in closely (watch your feet if you sit in the front row) and holds up to scrutiny.
The southern drawing room is wide and fat with detail and dimension. It gives off an endless impression, with bits of other rooms peaking in the sides. Voices drift in from other areas of the house, giving physical meaning to the all-important gossip train passing through the space.
At one point, as two frightened characters whisper conspiratorially in the main room, the vast looming shadow of another just outside the door is cast across the back wall. It’s not entirely clear if this is intentional, but it’s an electric and horrifying image.
The most striking single piece of the set is the piece of stain glass upstairs complete with foxes curling around its edges.
It is the setting for the two Hubbard family brothers, Ben (Craig Stoebling) and Oscar (Vern Poitras), to form the masculine portion of the family’s plotting. Stoebling is by far the more imposing actor, his style and southern drawl silky smooth, contrasted by Poitras’ curious physical floppiness — despite Oscar’s tendency toward brutal violent control.
This will be Stoebling’s last show in Albuquerque it seems and will soon be returning home to New York City. He will be surely missed.
Oscar married an aristocrat, Birdie (Linda Williams), simply to acquire her wealth and land, and it is Williams’ performance as a genuine and trapped soul that shines like a gem throughout the play.
Though it is the Hubbard sister, Regina (Marcia Tepppit), that is the dynamic element of the play. She speaks the subversive southern rhetoric with the best of them. Gracious insults and double-meanings fly like rain, the phrase “What they mean to say …” driven into amusing repetition as they dance around the senses of things.
Regina tops this with a deadly and purposeful edge. She is a terrible, twisted manipulator and a truly powerful woman.
“I shouldn’t like to be too definite,” she says, with all the ambition and lust in the world behind her.
Tippit’s performance is real and sound, but the lines are drawn too clearly of motive and justification. Regina is selfish, cruel and a sociopath. Let’s call it what it is: evil.
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Even the perverse sense of you that respects her ability will want her to lose and not get what she wants. She should have been humanized, context given to why she acts with such self-serving ferocity.
She acts a portrait of evil — feminine and commanding and wonderfully detailed, but still two-dimensional.
There is even a passing reference to incest, like an half-apologetic pass at why the inhumanity is allowed to continue, the stagnant bits at bottom of the barrel scraped and sloshed around until something works its way back up.
This go at lightness in the face of disgust and the weirder and darker potentials of humanity is something to be appreciated.
There are three acts set apart by intermissions.
The first two acts skip along briskly, with the family politics quiet, clever and engrossing. The pacing of the final act, however, slows almost to a halt. By far, the least happens beyond a few pivotal inevitabilities. Perhaps it’s the noticeable absence of the brothers, particularly Ben, though Birdy does get some of her best stuff here.
Despite this, it’s slow and is not the finisher that the crafty play deserves.
As the play is coming to a close, suddenly the narrative takes an abrupt change: Ben makes a lofty speech about how there will be Hubbards everywhere taking over the country.
No longer is it just a personal and loosely autobiographical play about a conniving southern family. It’s about the effective ruthlessness and sociopathy of the Rockefellers and J Paul Getty’s of capitalism. No wonder Hellman got called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“The Little Foxes”
by Lillian Hellman, directed by Hal Simons
The Vortex Theatre
2004 1/2 Central Ave. S.E.
Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m.
Sunday at 6 p.m.
$15, Student Rush $10
