I was lonely. . .not the way people usually mean. Lonely for all the things I wasn't going to get. Everything in this house was so busy and there was so little place for what I wanted. I wanted the world. . .and then Papa died and left the money to Ben and Oscar.— Regina telling husband Horace that she married him mistakenly thinking he would give her some of what she wanted. I don't know. I thought I liked him.. . Ask why he married me! I can tell you that: My family was good and the cotton on Lionnet's fields was better. Ben Hubbard wanted the cotton and Oscar Hubbard married it for him. — Birdie, in answer to the same question, this one posed by the niece she is determined to save from falling into the same trap —a marriage which in twenty-two years hasn't brought one whole day of happiness.

Charles Wright's Report On the Complete Linney/Nixon Role Switching Experience

Laura Linney as Regina

There's more than gimmickry in the double casting of female leads in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. The much-lauded Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) revival, with Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon alternating as parvenu Southerner Regina Hubbard Giddens and her better-born sister-in-law, Birdie, has been extended through Sunday, July 2. Ambitious playgoers will now have more chances to see for themselves why MTC's decision to double cast this American classic is so worthwhile.

A 2000 Broadway engagement of Sam Shepard's True West featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, playing a pair of competitive brothers and switching roles from performance to performance. ( Curtainup's review). The distinguished Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, has been presenting Hamlet this month with Jonathan Dyrud and Laura Welsh Berg alternating in the title part and the role of Rosencrantz. But opportunities to see actors exchanging roles in this manner are rare.

Cynthia Nixon as Regina

Linney and Nixon are technically superb and riveting to watch, though markedly different in the two roles. What's distinctive to each actor works well within the parameters of director Daniel Sullivan's interpretation of this drama from the 1938-39 Broadway season.

In her 1973 memoir Pentimento Hellman recalls that when producer-director Herman Shumlin was casting the original production of The Little Foxes prominent actresses shied away from Regina for fear the character's unsympathetic qualities might damage their public images. Tallulah Bankhead, whose career was at a low ebb, was engaged for the part after Ina Claire and Judith Anderson turned it down.

Linney and Nixon both feast on what's less than appealing in Regina. Linney cloaks herself in nouveau riche hauteur. With pompadour coiffure (evocative of John Singer Sargent's portrait of Nancy Astor) and stately Gibson Girl era gowns, Linney's Regina is a grand chatelaine, striking one imperious pose after another. Her deportment indicates how proud she is to have scaled social terrain from middling status to the tip-top of the upper middle class, but also how insecure she is underneath the sophisticated carapace.

Nixon is a more relaxed, casual Regina. Her movements are fluid, feline and insouciant. Speaking with detachment, she's chilly rather than regal. Her lower imperiousness quotient suggests that this Regina is more self-confident and less apt to strain for refinement than Linney's. After stirring cream into her coffee, for instance, Nixon licks the spoon greedily, a self-indulgent bit of stage business, indicative of Regina's humble beginnings and unimaginable from Linney's more stiffly poised Regina.

Fantasizing about the investment she's demanding husband Horace (Richard Thomas) make in her brothers' new cotton mill, Regina proclaims: "I'm going to Chicago. And when I'm settled there and know the right people and the right things to buy — because I certainly don't now — I shall go to Paris and buy them."

In Linney's reading, that line bespeaks real insecurity. Her Regina is abashed about not being acquainted with the right people or their tastes; she's on guard against gestures or actions that might compromise her imposing affectations, and fearful of losing some of the social ground she has gained. Nixon's Regina, on the other hand, isn't abashed or afraid of being found out; she's simply concerned with climbing higher up the social ladder.

The difference in the actresses' interpretations is most marked in Act Three, when Regina realizes that Horace has scotched her chance of gaining a share in her brothers' ambitious business venture. At that moment, Linney's audacious self-possession melts away with her villainy. Her posture sags; she loses her grand-lady drawl. For a few moments (until fate intervenes to keep Horace from following through on his plan), Linney's Regina is reduced to what she was in her early days: daughter of a humble shopkeeper (perhaps a former peddler), destined to peer in the windows of the rich without ever being invited inside.

Nixon never gives us the idea that her Regina sees defeat as a possibility. Her Regina is a villain throughout, lucky before and determined to regain the upper hand as swiftly as possible. Her progress may be slowed, but there's no doubt she'll persevere.

Taking on the role of Birdie, the abused wife who drinks on the sly, Nixon comes across as especially wretched and beaten down. Linney, on the other hand, is more energetic and, consequently, less pathetic.

The question of pathos is important here. Hellman was writing this play in a decade when important American thinkers were re-assessing the impact of industrialization on life in the South and lamenting the demise of the agrarian tradition. As Stark Young wrote in "Not In Memoriam, But In Defense" (one of the essays of the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand): "It would be childish and dangerous for the South to be stampeded and betrayed out of its own character by the noise, force, and glittering narrowness of the industrialism and progress spreading everywhere, with varying degrees, from one region to another." The Little Foxes is, in large part, about the stampede and betrayal that concerned Young and his Agrarian brethren.

The modesty and simplicity of Nixon's Birdie reflect the noblesse oblige ideal of her upper crust origins — a linchpin of the Old South that Young admired. The imperiousness of Linney's Regina perfectly embodies the noise and force that Young saw as having trampled the gentility and traditions of plantation culture and the urban charms of pre-industrial Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Nixon's Birdie is a neurotic mess, but her gentle deportment is more a matter of breeding than of low self-esteem. Even when drunk, she's gallant — kind, loving and courteous to all about her — from the servants (Caroline Stefanie Clay and Charles Turner) to the husband (Darren Goldstein) who often brutalizes her.

Hellman has given Birdie an Act Three aria that goes from sober cheer to drunken despair. Both actresses handle it with aplomb (and, at the performances I attended, both received spontaneous applause); but Nixon captures the Jekyll-Hyde transformation of a fueled-up alcoholic with a precision that I've never seen on stage before.

Is either actress better in one role than the other? The answer is no — they're both at the top of their form and both offer interpretations that are intriguing and defensible. Though the chemistry of the ensemble is affected somewhat by the role switches, the two fit admirably among their colleagues in both parts. In sociological terms, though, there's a special aptness to Linney's grandiose Regina, stampeding what Stark Young calls "the fine flower" of "Southern civilization" as that blossom is poignantly represented by Nixon's gentle, utterly credible Birdie.