Lillian Hellman was many things: a first-rate playwright (The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine); a gutsy testifier who refused to "name names" when called before the McCarthy era's House Un-American Activities Committee ("I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions"); a good friend of writer Dorothy Parker (with whom she shared a taste for alcohol), and on-and-off longtime companion of Dashiell Hammett (author of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon), and a man whose volatile, ornery nature in many ways reflected her own.
By her own admission, Hellman was a tempestuous, difficult, stubborn, complex woman. And we certainly sense all this in Lillian, William Luce's fascinating one-woman show that is part biography, part fantasia and is now in a limited engagement at TimeLine Theatre, running in tandem with the company's stirring revival of The Children's Hour.
Hellman tells us early on that memory cannot always be trusted, and that dreams and distortions tend to be a good deal prettier than the whole truth. Of course, Hellman was the target of a notorious 1980 attack by fellow author Mary McCarthy, who announced: "Every word she writes is a lie, including AND and THE." (That accusation led to a long, bitter defamation suit that goes unmentioned in this 1986 play -- a suit that withered after Hellman's death in 1984.)
In any case, director Louis Contey's revival of Lillian -- featuring actress Janet Ulrich Brooks in a beautifully measured yet intensely emotional and intelligent performance -- has the clear ring of truth. And that is sufficient for the theater.
The whole richly atmospheric memoir, which unspools as Hellman stands death watch outside Hammett's hospital room, certainly rings true in its vivid recollection of the writer's childhood: Her early years in New Orleans and New York, with a passive Southern belle for a mother, a businessman of German-Jewish ancestry for a father and, most crucially, Sophronia, her black caretaker, perhaps the only person who could both control her and win her heart.
The Broadway and Hollywood days and the difficult relationship with Hammett also are expertly chronicled. And Brooks, fervent, yet scrubbed of sentimentality, captures it all with precision and honesty.
