Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic

I have finished with Lillian Hellman. Her Toys in the Attic was her last original play. Her Collected Plays ends with an adaptation. I decided to pass on it.

I want to try something different with Toys in the Attic. I start with the views of others about the play. I am jumping over most of the plot - all the articles provide a better plot. Brother obtains a lit of money and tries to buy happiness for his family but that scares them and his younger wife thinking he is leaving her sets in motion a terrible event. I do think the play worth reading and would like to see a good production.

Hilton Als did not see like the play in his 2014 review A FAMILY AFFAIR. 

Lillian Hellman’s penultimate play, “Toys in the Attic” (now in revival at the Pearl Theatre Company), first produced in 1960, is as creaky as an old four-poster bed. Though it can be pleasant to rest for a moment in its carefully embroidered sheets—if only to be reminded of the familiar scents with which Hellman sprinkled her most autobiographical work: incest, miscegenation, and camellias—the play’s charm is musty and, in the end, tiresome. In fact, “Toys in the Attic” is so thin that you may find yourself supplementing the onstage drama with the real family history on which it is based. Hellman’s father, Max, who was Jewish, was doted on by his two spinster sisters. After the shoe business that he’d established in New Orleans with the help of his wife’s money went under, Max became atravelling haberdashery salesman. (The Hellmans spent part of every year in New York until Lillian was a teen-ager.) According to Hellman lore, Max’s sisters, who ran a series of boarding houses, were thrifty and repressed, dour and witty. It’s interesting to note that the only significant invention in “Toys in the Attic” is the dialogue, which, as Joan Mellen points out in “Hellman and Hammett,” her eminently readable 1996 study, was helped along by the writer Dashiell Hammett, Hellman’s companion for many years, who also suggested part of the plot.

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 ...To be fair, Hellman’s stage directions, and the play itself, are such a mishmash of different attitudes, influences, and ideologies that it takes a brave actor and an even braver director to get to the heart of the meanness that she wants to explore, and which Jane Bowles characterized as the incredible strength of the weak. By the end of the play, we should be recoiling in horror from Carrie and Lily. Instead, we just want to forget the entire evening.

Ginia Bellafante reviews the same production in her Polishing the Silver as a Family of Cannibals Licks Its Chops with a different conclusion:

...Family life is a stifling affair in Hellman’s work, the relationships among siblings founded on a will to emotional cannibalism. They replace love with possession, and from the fruits of ownership no happiness is ever squeezed.

This idea supplies the profound heart of “Toys in the Attic,” Hellman’s last play and the subject of Austin Pendleton’s excellent revival, a production of the Pearl Theater Company, which opened on Sunday night. Written in 1960, 21 years after “The Little Foxes” explored the destructive enmity of the Hubbard siblings, Hellman’s final theatrical effort offers an even more dismal evocation of the 20th-century family.

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 Mr. Pendleton situates many of Albertine’s scenes on the Berniers’ porch, which consumes the right side of the stage (the rest of it is taken up with the family’s tattered living room); we are figuratively outside, as if to suggest that the only hope for a vaguely fulfilling life is to conduct it outside the confining parameters of traditional domesticity.

“Toys in the Attic” is a play that has no patience for nostalgia and nothing but judgments for the obsessive attachments of family. It yearns, remarkably, for room and reason.

Theater Mania provides Brian Scott Lipton's Toys in the Attic, also a more positive review. 

Variety's Toys in the Attic takes a middle way with a 2000 Berkshire Theater Festival production.

...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.

 Charles Sabel's Toys in the Attic in the November 18, 1967 Harvard Crimson is another dismissive review:

Leland Moss's production of Toys in the Attic is a willful distortion of a medicore play. But by the mysterious calculus of such things, the distortions hide what should be hidden, muffle the play's mechanical grinding, and render it one of the finest dramas I have seen in some time.

Colony Theater's Program Notes Lillian Hellman and Toys in the Attic  makes a point no one else emphasizes but is oh so true (and maybe a most autobiographical one):

Theatre director Robert Brustein once said, "Lillian's major subject was money, how it is made, how it changes lives and what people do to acquire it--in Toys in the Attic money is stroked as if it were a domestic animal." The money at the heart of Toys that is sought after, adored, loved, and loathed is certainly no small amount: $150,000 in 1957. The equivalent cash value today is almost a million dollars. 

 I think the Tennessee Williams comparisons a little facile. Sex is what I think of with Tennessee Williams, not money. Hellman's play centers on money. Maybe the Williams connection runs in a different direction - from her to him.

I thought of Hellman's big influences - Ibsen and Anton Chekhov - filtered through a Southern woman with far left politics. Jacob H Adler's Miss Hellman's Two Sisters from Theatre Journal 15 of 1963 leaves me thinking I am onto something here.

Along with money, I thought Lily the innocent and idealistic wife falling under the spell of the sister with sinister intentions towards the brother/husband dramatized the corruption of idealism by those with selfish goals. Again, a possible autobiographical theme? In a production, I would hope to see the horror I read on the page.

For what else I have written about Hellman, click on the "Theater" link below where it says Labels.

sch 6/8/22