Star Attractions

...Rather it is mere isolation in a hole...

...Hellman never explains how such a family could have stayed in close contact for so many years...

...Austin Templeton's direction seeks to accentuate the dramatic impact of the lambs as well as the foxes, but the actors' main worry seems to be maintaining their Southern accents...

...Later, BenjaminHub-ard guesses from Alexandra's horror that Regina is responsible for her husband's death, and this gives him the opportunity to extort his share back from his sister...

...Unmitigated villains like Regina Giddens, her brothers, and especially Benjamin Hubbard (who is almost her equal in deadly cunning) are more caricatures than stereotypes...

...On Stage STAR ATTRACTIONS BY LEO SAUVAGE Since it was bringing Elizabeth Taylor to Broadway for the first time, the new production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes at the Martin Beck Theater had to be-And certainly has not tried to avoid being-A major show-business event...

...if he looked inhibited and uncomfortable, he quickly managed to transform these impediments into professional assets...

...He does not even dream of getting rid of his stammer or being freed of his pathological shyness...

...The brothers are then caught stealing stock certificates from the bank that belong to Regina's husband, enabling her toblackmail them into increasing her share in the millto75 percent...

...She even seems to love her uncles, and for two-thirds of the play her only glimmer of sane instinct is her attraction to Birdie and her repulsion for Leo...

...The playwright seems so involved in the greed of her characters that she fails to give them coherence in anything except their efforts to wring some financial advantage from each other...

...She injects the right amount of venom in the right moment in the right place while cutting someone down, and she is convincing at hating and being hateful...

...But few people would want to spend a whole evening with them, let alone pay for the privilege...

...Unfortunately, Paul seems less of a poetic dreamer than a hopeless misfit...

...Interestingly, during a recent interview on public television Hellman declared, "I dislike intensely the talk of money...

...Arthur and Weston unexpectedly turn the scene into soap opera at its best, and Weston adds a successful vaudeville number imitating a singing dog...

...One day, he says, he will hit the big number, something Enid cannot understand as she pesters him for a few dollars...

...One hoped that the third production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater-A play written especially for the space by a member of the com-pany's artistic directorate-would finally fulfill the original declaration...

...Birdie belatedly lets off some steam which, unbeknown to the audience, has been boiling inside her...

...But the virtuous sufferers are quite distinct from the more important figures who deal in cash instead of sentiments...

...She will leave her mother, but one doubts that in "the spring of 1900" she will go far from her "small town in the South" with a devoted black maid who merely adds her own helplessness to Alexandra's...

...Still, she would be little more than a piece of furniture if Maureen Stapleton, in what is really a most extraordinary acting feat, did not give her an unexpected, deeply human, almost fascinating existence...

...But it is a mark of the star's professionalism that despite the adulating crowds on the sidewalk, her presence on stage as the malign Regina Giddens does not prevent Heltman's best known work from remaining a play, to be seen and discussed as such, rather than a mere vehicle...

...Birdie is mistreated by her husband, ignored by everyone else and loved only by Regina' s daughter Alexandra, another defenseless lamb...

...The real problem is Allen's apparent conviction that the audience at the Beaumont is going to be composed of fans who will love Paul as much as they love his creator...

...She wastes no time in ambiguities: There is nothing good in the bad ones, nothing bad in the good ones...

...At the the beginning of the present season, a new team took over the expanse set apart for legitimate theater inside New York's Lincoln Center and promised to provide a forum for the best in the performing arts...

...Elizabeth Taylor is very impressive, yes, powerful, when Regina is at her meanest...

...Alas, Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb does nothing of the sort...

...Hellman owes one improvement in her play to Taylor's presence...

...Her eventual revolt, upon discovering how her mother in effect killed her father, sets things straight only in theory...

...When Regina confronts her husband, whose fatal heart attack she is hastening, the mention of their not having been intimate for 10 years is more significant than it might seem in the text because the woman is Elizabeth Taylor...

...All he wants is to be left alone...

...Other than this one interlude, Allen's rejection of the drab pressures of life in a Canarsie tenement is not a victory of imagination over matter...

...No wonder Max has found a younger woman in the neighborhood...

...Paul (Brian Backer), 17, in Allen's eyes obviously is the main reason for us to be interested in the story-or memories-he recounts...

...When the play opens, each is busy trying to cheat the other out of part ownership in a new cotton mill...

...Brian Backer is quite good in the part of Paul as it is written, but for one who is slightly allergic to the way Woody Allen looks and moves, it is not enough merely to watch somebody who looks and moves like Woody Allen...

...To be sure, we witness plenty of suffering alongside the cynicism...

...In less sharply defined situations, where she must talk and behave normally, her lack of stage experience becomes apparent...

...Ann Talman cannot rescue Alexandra from Hellman's schematized dime-novel transformation...

...In a grotesque yet sentimental and sometimes touching fashion, his attraction to Enid corroborates her feeling that she really could have been a dancer after all...

...The bad people, on the other hand, cannot be called conventional...

...Nevertheless, Anthony Zerbe as Benjamin Hubbard and Tom Aldredge as Horace Giddens (the sick husband whom Regina, using their daughter Alexandra, lures back from his isolation in Baltimore because she needs his signature for the cotton mill deal) manage not to be either artificial or superficial...

...Unhappily, the Lincoln Center Theater Company made its debut with an indifferent The Philadelphia Story followed by a very poor Macbeth...

...Enid induces a fifth-rate "artistic manager" (Jack Weston) to come and see Paul's miserable exhibition...

...He has no ideas, no originality, and exhibits neither the will nor the talent for becoming a professional magician...

...Innocent Alexandra neither notices nor feels that anything is wrong with her strange family...

...His obsession with "practicing" magic tricks cannot be mistaken for a vocation...

...The central weakness in this viperine as well as foxy play, in fact, is its excessive preoccupation with dollars...

...Instead, she has become a nagging, drinking housewife, largely because of her 18-year marriage to a good for nothing...

...The morbid presence of the author's "hero" does not spoil a well-written and entertaining scene that takes up a good part of the second act...

...Paul remains a virtually retarded child whose obsession with the floating light bulb he has managed to buy cannot obscure the fact that not much light flickers inside his head...

...Her husband Max (Danny Aiello), makes very little money working and spends much more gambling...

...In The Little Foxes, however, she clearly enjoys talking about money and shares and percentages...

...The play returns us to the realistic period of American theater that seemed to have disappeared in the dark at the top of the stairs years ago...

...Watching him, it is impossible to find out what his dreams might be...

...The difference is that if Allen had dreams, they must have been of how to succeed in life...

...So that Birdie can go on with her sorry life, Hellman not very originally has her pretending frequent headaches and retiring with a bottle...

...Paul has been described as the dreamer, the poet, the unconventional artist Allen himself is said to have been when he was the same age...

...Enid Pollack (Bea Arthur), who once may have had a good body, likes to think she could have been a dancer...

...It probably was not the author's intention to convince us of Paul's utter ineptitude, but I don't believe Director Ulu Grosbard or Brian Backer can be accused of misunderstanding the character...

...A temporary hiatus in its performance, owing to Taylor's tearing a chest ligament, has hardly dimmed the popularity of the limited engagement no w extended to September...

...it has nothing new to offer in the way of social or psychological or poetic drama...

...Nothing of the kind will ever happen to Paul...

...This single glimmer of illusion in The Floating Light Bulb does not last long: The artistic manager will carefully keep Enid's telephone number, but he is retiring with his sick mother to Arizona...

...For a few seconds at least, we can imagine that the talk is not only about money...

...Here we are back at the bottom, in a Canarsie tenement with the Pollacks-one of those forlorn, dreary families that no doubt actually exist...

...Less commonplace is Birdie's hatred of her son Leo, something we may understand by watching him, although we never find out what happened in the past 20 years to create so much ill-will between mother and son...

...He is on the way to becoming what social workers call the product of a broken family...

...The latter are helpless victims like Birdie Hubbard, the unhappy wife of Regina Gidden's brother, Oscar...

...Hellman's situations are complicated, not her people...

...The younger of two sons, 13-year-old Steve (Eric Gurry) steals pennies from his father's pockets, does not like to go to school, is fresh to his mother, and nasty to everyone else...