Another Part of the Forest and Can You Hear Their Voices? Receive Rare Revivals
Lillian Hellman looks back at the Gilded Age; Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Cliffort chart drought and the Depression
Details
By Lillian Hellman
Theatre at St. Clements
423 West 46th Street, 212-352-3101
Can You Hear Their Voices?
By Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford,
based on a short story by Whittaker Chambers
Peculiar Works
2 Great Jones Street, 212-352-3101
Related Content
More About
Flanagan and Clifford evolved Voices from a short story in the leftist magazine New Masses, written by Whittaker Chambers, later notorious for his role in the Alger Hiss case. It lays out the misery of the drought then affecting small farmers and sharecroppers in the Ozarks in a manner that is stilted and simplistic, but not inauthentic. Alternating scenes of starvation among the rural poor with brittle snippets of high life among the rich and their political cronies, it traces a path to nonviolent revolution in terms that stress humanity and fairness over agitprop. Peculiar Works' production, impressively elaborate for such threadbare circumstances, tends to push the ideas at you heavily, but a genuine faith in the work's immediate relevance dignifies the pushing. Inartistic the results may be, but given the mess the world is currently in, other concerns may be more urgent than artistry.
