In the world of Lillian Hellman’s plays, one need only scratch the surface to find whole worlds of secrets, lies, and corruption nestled neatly beneath a veneer of normality. And in the world of Toys in the Attic, beneath a coating of fiction lies Hellman’s most autobiographical play, a dramatization of the complex and even sordid facts of her family and upbringing.
Lillian Hellman is best known for her plays The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour, the latter of which was adapted into a film starring Audrey Hepburn. Her next greatest claim to fame is likely her 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Committee, in which she defended her ties to the Communist Party by declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
Hellman never tried to hide the influence of her politics on her work. She has been compared to Arthur Miller, due to their mutual interest in theatre’s ability to provide political ideas and social commentary, and on placing a priority on plots and thematic arcs rather than their contemporary Tennessee Williams’ expansive expressions of characters’ interiority. Aside from being called up to testify about her Communist affiliations, Hellman dedicated herself to advocating for the nascent Screenwriters Guild and unabashedly condemning America’s reluctance to enter the war against Hitler. This latter idea took dramatic form in her 1941 play Watch on the Rhine, which TACT produced in 2005.
Hellman was born to a Jewish family in New Orleans in 1905. Throughout her childhood, her family alternated between New Orleans and New York City, where Hellman eventually stayed for college, attending New YorkUniversity and ColumbiaUniversity. In 1929, she spent time travelling Europe, until encounters with Nazi student groups spurred her to return to America, where she moved to Hollywood to read scripts for MGM. In Hollywood, she met and began a relationship with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, famous for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. Though the pair never married, they maintained a sporadic relationship until Hammett’s death. Many biographers and critics have speculated about the degree to which Hammett influenced, or even participated in, the writing of Hellman’s plays, particularly her biggest hits.
Toys in the Attic was initially borne of a plot that Hammett suggested, about a man whose loved ones abandon him once he finally achieves success. But over the three years it took Hellman to write the play, it diverged from this original suggestion as Hellman delved into her own past. The perennially unsuccessful Julian is based off Hellman’s own father, who likewise briefly owned and subsequently lost a shoe factory. Carrie’s more-than-filial affection for her brother is based on Hellman’s own experience, not with her brother or father, but with an uncle, to whom she was deeply attracted when she was young. Albertine’s relationship with Henry mirrors an affair one of Hellman’s aunts had with an African American chauffeur.
The original production was a star-studded affair, directed by Arthur Penn and featured two original songs by Marc Blitzstein. Actors included Jason Robards as Julian, Maureen Stapleton as Carrie, and Irene Worth as Albertine. Hellman kept a strict eye on the process, and Penn was forced to chastise her for intimidating the actors by continually coughing in the audience to register her disapproval of their choices. The production was nominated for Best Play in the 1960 Tony Awards, though it lost to The Miracle Worker, adapted from Helen Keller’s autobiography.
The question of biography is a fraught subject when it comes to Hellman: after her memoirs were released, she was widely attacked with claims that the recollections she presented were false. Fellow writer Mary McCarthy famously claimed that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” McCarthy and Hellman’s resultant feud was one of the first conflicts in the now-familiar arena of memoirists called to account for the truth of their narratives. Hellman’s reputation since her death in 1984 has been defined largely by biographers both of Hellman and of Dashiell Hammett devoted to pointing out the apparent lies and factual inconsistencies in her memoirs. The glee with which the works of this famously difficult woman are picked apart speaks, perhaps, to a discomfort with Hellman’s aggressive attitude that she faced throughout her life and which has persisted after her death. But Hellman’s tightly plotted dramas are worthy of recognition in their own right, and Toys in the Attic is all the more interesting for its tantalizing glimpses of autobiography, which one can’t help but imagine might lead the way to something essential about Hellman herself, buried within the layers of this Southern drama. TACT is proud to present this lesser-known work by a writer who well deserves her status as an American master.
