Too Many Trees

Neurotic families are much more interesting than normal ones--at least on stage. A good mix of Oedipal tangles, money, repressed anger, dark power plays, and a pinch or two of insanity ought to guarantee an enthralling evening, right? After all, the recipe worked for Oedipus and Hamlet.

That seems to be the idea behind Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest," now at the Lyric Stage in Boston. The Hubbards are a juicy enough bunch: the miserly patriarch with a shadowy past; his wife, a religious fanatic; one son who schemes ruthlessly; another who whines and steals; and a daughter who compares unfavorably with Scarlett O'Hara. While Alabama in 1880 isn't a Danish castle, at least it provides a set of usefully poor neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan.

For all that, "Another Part of the Forest" never approaches the level of great drama. In part, it's the fault of this particular production. The theater is tiny (about one hundred seats on three sides of a floor-level stage), and which brings the audience uncomfortably close to the intense emotionality onstage. Watching the play becomes like eavesdropping on the people who live through the fire-door. The decor and lighting never change, and the costumes look as though they'd been thrown together out of somebody's attic.

Such details could be overlooked if the acting weren't so uneven. Regina, the daughter, is written as the center of energy in the children's conflict; but Robin Lane, complete with Barbie Doll face and cocktail waitress hairstyle, gives an annoyingly superficial performance. Her flirtatious manner, exaggerated gestures, even he phrasing, are all much too predictable: she extrapolates the obvious from each line, rather than offering any emotional integrity or depth of characterization.

As written, all the characters are relatively wooden, and to push beyond stereotype requires unusual subtlety and conviction. Of the performers in this production, Eda Rabinovitz alone (as the mother) plays her part from the inside out. She makes the events real by the truth of the characterization rather than the other way round.

The problem of this production, though, lie not so much with the actors as with the play itself. For one thing, it's much too long: after all, who really wants to sit through nearly three hours of blood-line politics? The length is exaggerated by the quality of the emotional stasis. In the first act, the audience is served a lavish offering of greed, selfishness, jealousy, and fear; in the second act, the theme is greed, selfishness, jealousy, and fear; in the third act...you get the idea. There's very little variation or development, with the result that what ought to be a wrenching death-struggle is merely interesting in a nasty sort of way. And when everyone is so intriguingly abnormal, it's hard to identify with anyone enough to become emotionally involved.

Admittedly, the twists and turns of the plot are thoroughly absorbing. When all the endless viciousness becomes tiresome, this is in fact the only quality which holds the play together. Deeper elements are hinted: all sorts of unnamed fears, complicated hatreds, distortions of familial roles... but for all the overt turbulence, the inner voices remain mute.

Still, not everyone is fussy about depth psychology. If you are willing to settle for a good old-fashioned power-struggle instead, this is not a bad play. If nothing else, it ought to make you appreciate the folks back home in Schenectady.