from Olivia

Lillian Hellman was often referred to as ‘a spitfire’. She embodied the fearlessly abrasive spirit of her catalogue of work. Living with a larger than life personality, she constantly struggled to balance her need for independence and privacy with her need to be supported by other. As a result, most of the relationships in her life were turbulent, quick, and/or unsettling. She found it difficult to trust anyone, beginning with her parents.
Lillian was born to Max Hellman & Julia Newhouse Hellman in1905 New Orleans. She idolized her father for his dynamic personality, until she discovered he was cheating on her mother. As a result, Lillian fell out of a fig tree on purpose and broke her nose. This began a streak of rebellious behavior. At that point in her life, the only person whom she could trust was her Black Nurse, Sophronia. Impulsive by nature, Lillian didn’t blink an eye when she faked a heart attack and ran away to a boarding school for blacks. After the split, Lillian’s early years became surrounded by an eclectic mix of colorful characters. She spent half the year with her mother’s wealthy relatives, The Newhouses, in New York, and the other half with her father’s sisters who ran a boarding house in New Orleans. Lillian was fascinated by the comfort and style of the rich, but repulsed by their materialistic values- a theme explored in a majority of her work. Because she moved around so much, she had very little formal education until she attended NYU & Columbia. However, she dropped out before graduation and became an editor/reader for the play publishing organization, Horace Liveright, Inc. Eventually, she became a script reader at MGM while juggling reporting for political conventions, primarily liberal.
At MGM, she met the writer, Arthur Kober. The two hit it off and soon after, married. However, just as quickly, she fell in love with another writer, Dashiell Hammett, who also acted as her mentor. Through the suggestion of a Scottish short story, Hammett introduced Lillian to the premise of her first great play, “The Children’s Hour” (1934). “The Children’s Hour” was an extremely controversial tale of a little girl accusing two of her teachers at boarding school of lesbianism. The work proved so successful, it was quickly made into a feature film staring Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, and Audrey Hepburn. However, for every glowing review “The Children’s Hour” received, there was an equally negative one. Lillian’s work was accused of being “melodramatic”. In response to criticism, Lillian’s feelings of inadequacy kept her from writing for the theatre for two years. Eventually, however, she dusted herself off and truly began to cultivate her playwriting process: thoroughly researching the time period, especially the social and economic world’s of the piece, and fine tuning her abilities as a moralist by tackling more personal subject matters. She looks to the Newhouses for inspiration for her next piece.
Her next play, “The Little Foxes” (1939) became her most frequently produced. It followed the story of Regina Hubbard Giddens, daughter of a Southern aristocrat who left all of his inheritance to his sons. Regina avenges her brothers by blackmailing them. It quickly became the quintessential tale of the female triumphant. “By that play’s end [The Little Foxes], Regina, for whom financial power had become a substitute for sex, has triumphed economically over both her husband and brothers, in a kind of gleeful revenge for having years before been dispossessed and betrayed by her own father” (Adler, 47). The original production opened on February 15, 1939 and ran 410 performances. A majority of critics coincided with Richard Watts Jr.’s rave review, “Miss Hellman’s new play is a grim, bitter and merciless play; a drama more honest, more pointed and more brilliant than even her triumphant previous work, ‘The Children’s Hour.” John Anderson, a prominent critic of the time, cited that she was closer to achieving the genius of Eugene O’Neil than any of the male competition: Maxwell Anderson or Clifford Odets. Propelling her to the forefront of modern realism, she wasn’t afraid to let her characters bask in their dark sides. However, her rather pessimistic portraits of people caused critics to question whether or not Hellman even liked the human race. John Gassner wrote, “The indictments she incorporates in her plays seem indictments of human nature itself, giving rise to the complaint that she does not like people.” Some critics were not as impressed with her pessimistic nature as others. They dismissed “The Little Foxes” as ‘melodramatic, operatic dead weight’. However, this time, Hellman was not deterred.
Hellman’s eventually reached a turning point in her career with, “Another Part of the Forest”, the prequel to “The Little Foxes”, not only as a writer but also as a budding director. Prior to this, Herman Shumlin had directed all of her previous pieces. During “The Little Foxes” and “The Children’s Hour”, Lillian would often attend rehearsal. Shumlin described his work with Hellman as never peaceful or calm. They would often have spats over the direction. She’d suggest blocking, but he never contributed to the writing in anyway. Shumlin felt that this was incredibly unfair, so Hellman eventually fired him. She was a strong, independent woman who was accustomed to playing a key role in the casting of all her plays and movies. Needless to say, she wasn’t intimidated. Critical response was generally positive; however, some felt the play was too morbid and that there were too many crises in a short period of time. The play ran only 182 performances before closing. This gave Lillian the kick in the pants she needed to begin experimenting with her cemented style.
Hellman broke away from the Ibsenite dramas of the 1930’s and 40’s with a number of radical departures. “William Wright notes, ‘she has been hounded by the critics into other styles: the Chekhovian, The Autumn Garden, then the Williamsish Toys in the Attic, and finally the Albeeish, My Mother, My Father, and Me” (Adler, 54). However, the most successful of these exercises was most certainly, “The Autumn Garden”. Wright compares Chekhov and Hellman, “Hellman pens one of the most Chekovian of all American plays in its reduction of outward plot, its wistful, elegiac tone of loss, and its handling of an ensemble cast. Hellman is still more judgemental, less lyrical, and less humorous than Chekhov; yet in “Garden”, emotion is conveyed more by subtext than by action, and visual symbolism of place and objects carries, as it does in Chekhov, more of the drama’s meaning” (Adler, 54). Hellman, herself, considered “The Autumn Garden” to be her best work. “I don’t know why except that I think I said more of what I felt in Autumn Garden than I ever said before or afterwards. It is the most mature play I ever wrote” (Hellman, 54). Always aiming to, first and foremost, communicate her arguments in the most effective manner, this was a great personal victory for Hellman.
“The Autumn Garden” told the story of a group of middle aged characters living in a Gulf Coast boarding house in September 1949. At the heart of the story is the relationship between Constance Tuckerman, the owner of the house, and Nick Denery, a painter. Twenty three years before the action of the play, Nick paints a portrait of Constance, capturing her youthful beauty, and then leaves for Paris to marry someone else. When he returns to the boarding house at the top the play, he paints another portrait of her: unglamorous and in a cheap housedress. Seeing the portraits beside each other, Constance begins to feel that she has wasted her life. Nick, too, comes to realize that he is no more than a slightly better than average amateur who uses his art to lure women into his bed. However, where Constance tries to better herself by proposing marriage to the local drunk, Nick doesn’t hesitate to keep at his ways, never coming to terms with his treatment of other people, especially women. “The leitmotifs in this drama of lost chances and dashed dreams are aging, waste, emptiness, boredom, ennui, the kind of atmosphere in which people, for want of anything better to do, hurt one another emotionally and psychologically” (Adler, 55). Essentially, “The Autumn Garden” confronts how the series of choices one makes defines the results and how you deal with them. “There are no minutes of great decision. Only a series of little ones coming out of the past. You don’t suddenly turn around—because it’s too damn late and you’ve let it go too long” (Hellman, 56). Her pessimistic outlook only ripened with age. For her last original play, “Toys In the Attic”, Lillian took a striking left turn towards a different kind of tragedy, drawing inspiration from her father and his sisters in New Orleans.
“Toys In the Attic” was her most commercially successful work. “Starring Maureen Stapleton and Jason Roberts Jr., it ran for 556 performances on Broadway, winning Hellman her second New York Drama Critics Circle Award”(Adler, 57).
“Toys In the Attic” told the story of two spinster sisters, Anna & Carrie, who had spend their whole lives caring for their younger brother, Julian, until he moves away to Chicago to marry someone much younger. In “Toys”, Lillian strove to take the roles of women and men in a household and turn them on their heads. However, “while they [Anna & Carrie] fooled themselves that Julian was dependent on them, it was really they who depended on him” (Adler, 58). There have been numerous comparisons between “Toys in the Attic” and “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen. “In that drama [A Doll’s House], Torvald treats Nora as his plaything, making her economically and, he believes ethically dependent upon her, just as her children are her little dolls” (Adler, 59). However, in “Toys”, the childish emotional development of the characters never grows into anything substantial and mature. They lock themselves up in their house and never leave. Hellman’s departure from the theatre took place in a similar manner.
After a number of flops following “The Toys in the Attic”, Hellman bowed out gracefully to work on her memoirs, “The plays aren’t as good as I’d remembered. They’re too on the nose—too airless. I pounded at things too much. They’ll have a minor place in the end, the plays, but no complaints about that. A minor place is a good place” (Feibleman, 65). She finished four lengthy volumes of memoirs before dying in 1984.
Barret H. Clark wrote an overview of Lillian’s work and purpose in writing, “Though she never wrote a play merely to entertain an audience, to win fame, or to make money, she never wrote a line without trying to say something that would help man escape or offset the effects of ignorance and wrong thinking.” (Shafer, 147). In the end, Lillian Hellman was simply a person trying to make a difference the only way she knew how. She was equally attacked and praised. She never once wrote a play that was just ‘okay’. It was either professed as horrible or the best play of the year or both at the same time. That is what I call an effective theatre artist.