All in the family 2nd Story’s riveting Little Foxes BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Little Foxes By Lillian Hellman. Directed by Ed Shea. With Joanne Fayan, Vince Petronio, Joe Hendersen, Tom Roberts, Gabby Sherba, Christin Goff, Tim White, Carol Pegg, Walter Perez, and Eric Behr. At 2nd Story Theatre through February 20.

Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes takes place at the razzle-dazzle turn of the century. But if it weren’t for its period costumes, we’d be hard-pressed to know which century, with the timeless greed and family brawling on display.

And thanks to a dynamic and precisely characterized rendition by 2nd Story Theatre, it all seems to be ad-libbed as we sit around like appalled drawing room guests.

Setting the play in the South of 1900, Hellman succeeded in 1939 — after nine rewrites — in demonstrating that while rampant selfishness works brilliantly on the corporate level, it just doesn’t scale down very well to family dimensions. (Hellman also got suspected of being a Communist sympathizer for this dour look at capitalism, but that’s another story.)

The Hubbards of New Orleans are an ostensibly gracious old family. As we first see them, they are wining and dining Chicagoan William Marshall (Eric Behr), who is there to consider choosing them as business partners. The plans are to bring a cotton mill to the cotton — and to blacks who will work for a pittance — a venture that will make them all rich. The trouble is, one of the family seems to be holding up the deal, not yet chipping in his share.

The sharks are circling in the water, smelling money. At the center of their attention is the holdout, brother-in-law Horace (Tom Roberts). He is away at a sanitarium, recuperating with a weak heart. His wife, Regina (Joanne Fayan), realizes that she has the upper hand with her two brothers. With her husband’s money, they would control the majority partnership, but they need her to talk her husband into the venture. (If the brothers went outside the family for money, that partner could ally with the Yankee, destroying their majority control.) Hmmm, Regina thinks, as her capitalist genes switch into action: my support should be worth much more than a one-third share.

Hellman has devised some ingenious plot machinery, each character in position to be a lever that can turn events in a plausible new direction. The two brothers are quite a pair. Vince Petronio plays alpha sibling Ben as unctuously polite but with a hairtrigger temper when his patience is pressed. Appropriately, Joe Henderson lets the anger of Oscar remain ever visible on the surface, boiling up when he is rubbed the wrong way — such as when he’s bullied into taking a smaller share.

But the characters who effect things the most are, with delicious irony, the weakest. Oscar’s wife, Birdie (Christin Goff), is the only aristocrat among them, and thereby the only one whose graciousness is sincere. Stifled at every opportunity by her husband, who won’t even let her show a photo album to their Chicago guest, she has not had one day of happiness in the 22 years of her married life. Birdie, into the elderberry wine, eventually admits all this to 17-year-old Alexandra (Gabby Sherba), who she is afraid will turn out like her unless she escapes the family.

Alexandra is the dutiful, though not yet repressed, daughter of Regina and Horace. No fool, hearing Birdie slapped by her husband and forced by her mother to retrieve her deathly ill father by train at his peril, Alexandra clearly sees the kind of person she is being trained to become. Being an actual teenager as well as a good actor, Sherba convincingly balances innocence and perceptiveness. As Birdie, Goff also manages a fine balancing act, early on laying the groundwork for later assertiveness. Horace is the third decent person in the Hubbard circle, and Roberts maintains the thoughtfulness of a dying man who has had five months to mull over the error of his and his wife’s family’s ways.

For the sake of verisimilitude, Hellman had the bad Hubbards use the N-word a lot. Director Ed Shea wouldn’t bowdlerize that away any more than he would neglect adding deft characterizing strokes to round out these portraits. (My favorite touch is not only that Oscar’s larcenous son Leo — a gee-evil-is-fun Tim White — keeps getting the back of his head whacked for stupidities, but that this is presented as wincingly painful, not just funny.) Even the roles of the two black servants have been made carefully specific, with Carol Pegg not exceeding the bounds of plausible sassiness and Walter Perez fully delighted at the unaccountable ways of these rich white folks.

The Little Foxes is a marvelous play, and this production keeps pace with its potential for riveting theater. Once again, 2nd Story has come up with an evening not to be missed.