[Few] passages in [Lillian Hellman's] plays have been lifted directly from life. Not because of a sparsity of dramatic incidents in her life, but simply because her writer's nature did not tolerate such self-indulgence. When she turned to life, she drew from the family circle of her mother and father. Her uncles and aunts on her mother's side had staged exciting and vigorous family battles that had awed and frightened her. Her father's sisters were warm and affectionate, devoted to him and to her. These childhood memories were stamped so indelibly that when playwriting settled on her as a profession, she found a new usefulness for her family. Certainly The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic could not have been written without the backlog of experience her family supplied.

If autobiographical actions photographed from her mature life do not figure prominently in her plays, ideas and actions from the life and times around her do. If her personal adventures have not been admitted, she has not locked the door of her work against the outside world. In all her plays—in some more than in others—one senses the temper of the time and the temper of Miss Hellman. Because she feels strongly about the way the world turns, she has favored characters who share her concern, vigorous characters fired with human passion. (p. 6)

[At] the beginning of her first play [The Children's Hour] … she seems wise to the drama's demand for clarity and economy, for the proper mixture of words and deeds, neither carrying the full burden, for incidents that command a life of their own as they also reveal character and unfold the story…. She abhorred excess, obscurity, and extravagance. (p. 41)

Miss Hellman knows the power of physical action. Pussyfooting on the fringes of confrontation, sparring, pretending are not her way. She wants to make the adrenalin flow, the nerve ends tingle, the muscles tighten. This is the stuff of which her drama is made. (p. 46)

Days to Come [Hellman's second Broadway production] was a failure, but not because its essential dramaturgy was different from The Children's Hour or different from the later plays. It was simply managed less expertly. The hints and signs were revealed in Ibsen-like fashion, a bit at a time, no more than needed, no more than easily grasped. Yet the manipulative hand of the playwright came into view too frequently. The characters, though vigorously committed to their beliefs, seemed bound by the playwright's harness rather than their own. The crucial confrontations, though never sidestepped, often became strident, embarrassingly simplified, and too dependent on knives and guns. The audience was asked to invest with the good guys and decry the bad, yet too often they were confused and uncertain about where to stake their allegiance. This frustration might have been more tolerable with a dramatist less occupied with good and evil. (pp. 64-5)

However confused and diffuse the total effect, Days to Come has many qualities of her first and of her later plays. Shifting tensions permeate the atmosphere. We sense the unresolved discords, the sultry hates and murderous impulses that lie below the surface. The utterances may often be quiet and decorous, yet there's a burning intensity behind them. (p. 69)

Miss Hellman's human and political sympathies may be aligned with the oppressed, with the pathetic poor, but she does not write their lives into her plays [as exemplified by The Little Foxes]. She chooses instead the lives of the favored few who accept their status as their due and who are oblivious of social guilt. (p. 86)

With Ibsen-like precision, Miss Hellman has dispensed the details [of the Hubbard's lives] naturally, gradually, sparingly, moment by moment, always whetting our appetite for the next morsel and filling in the portraits as the action unfolds. We are comfortable with Miss Hellman in the theatre. She keeps our curiosity alive without straining credibility. (p. 88)

The sheer raw emotional power of [the second act of The Little Foxes] is unsurpassed in the modern theatre. As our hate against the Hubbards is inflamed, we are secretly aware that Miss Hellman has struck at the aggressive impulses that lie below the surface in all of us. We have been hurled into a den of Southern foxes, true to themselves, true to their time, true to their society. They reveal the worst in themselves, clearly, naturally, and shamelessly, and their stark portraits appear more frightening outlined against those of Birdie, Alexandra, and Horace. (p. 98)

The Little Foxes is a powerful and fascinating play, a highly charged theatrical experience. Loathsome as the Hubbards are, loath as we are to grant their existence, we know Miss Hellman speaks the truth. Their kind did exist, do exist, and as we stand by and watch, they did and do conquer. Regina is a magnificent embodiment of evil: cold, hard, determined, and beautiful, larger than life, yet grounded to the life that made her. Genetic guidance and the perversities with which they've lived have also formed the others. We believe their evil machinations; and there are few moments when we are not burning with hate, distaste, pity, or love. We sense that we are seeing the old South as it truly was at the turn of the century. (pp. 103-04)

In reading the play we may be disturbed by the trappings of melodrama: strongboxes, stolen bonds, spilled medicine, death on the stairs. (p. 104)

The strength of the play derived from its melodramatic qualities, yet in total it was not a melodrama. She provided no reward for virtue, no punishment for vice, the stock-in-trade of melodrama. Nor should she be labeled a sensationalist because she dared to depict unpleasant and mean characters who suppressed their humanity, even in the face of death…. Too many nice-Nelly playwrights have become frightened of the word melodrama and thus have forgotten the power and excitement to be stirred by the genuine drama of character and will. They have shied away from evil and malice and turned their backs on grim and unpleasant situations. Miss Hellman knew that "America was melodrama in 1900,"… and she capitalized on what other playwrights had neglected. (pp. 104-05)

Watch on the Rhine is a warm and compassionate play, as it is also a play of pith and moment. The Farrellys and Müllers are as blessed with love and nobility as the Hubbards were cursed with hate and avarice…. The political challenge [in Watch on the Rhine] does not ring with strident battle alarums, drums, uniforms, and party salutes, yet the terrifying face of Fascism hangs like a gargoyle over the Farrelly household. No longer can the Atlantic and Potomac shield us from the Nazi menace. The message penetrates because these people are "human beings not their ideological ghosts," as Louis Kronenberger put it. (p. 130)

[Except] for those who suffered through the Hitler years, the fierce impact of the play in 1941 cannot be fully sensed. If it appears melodramatic now, it appeared melodramatic then, but with a difference: the world was boiling with melodrama. Cruelty and villainy were not figments of the playwright's imagination, and it was almost impossible for a writer to tell us anything we didn't already know or to dramatize atrocities more effectively than events had already dramatized them. Miss Hellman knew that her fiction must do more than demonstrate the strange and awful truth that screamed from the front pages of every daily paper. She tried, if she did not entirely succeed, to shift from the massive melodrama of life to the heroic human story of one family behaving "like thoroughbreds in an agonizing situation," as one critic remarked, by making us aware of the blinders we still wore, blinders the European had long since discarded, by alerting us to our own vulnerability.

[Watch on the Rhine] was a play of burning intensity for every American who cherished his life and his country, who believed that human decency could prevail. (p. 131)

The Searching Wind, even more than Watch on the Rhine, derives its strength from its immediacy. With Eisenhower's invasion of France two months away, with the Nazis still threatening, we struggled to know where we went wrong in bringing the civilized world to the edge of disaster. (pp. 155-56)

The ultimate power of the play rests with the bitter-sad indictment of the appeasers and with the documentary reminder of Munich. The personal reflections from the world mirror are too hazy: Alex bending to the will of Emily and Cassie as he bends to the diplomatic winds; Emily using power tactics to win Alex; Cassie, one of the have-nots, relentlessly seeking revenge for the wrong done her in Rome (her Versailles!) Instead the rendezvous of the unhappy triangle seems simply to coincide with the momentous events; and with the world falling apart, they appear banal and inconsequential. Nor do the characters assume any stature. With the possible exception of Moses Taney, the portraits are little more than line drawings. Full renderings were impossible with the multiple-scene scheme. The segmented structure—one critic called it "loose as a haystack"—also reduced the firepower of the political message. (p. 156)

Even if, as Miss Hellman suspected, American audiences were unwilling to face the truth, they kept the play running for 318 performances. It might have held on even longer if she had not tried so hard to write two plays at once, one political, the other personal. (p. 157)

[Another Part of the Forest] chronicles the life of the Hubbards in 1880, twenty years prior to their Little Foxes incarnation. Twenty years does not transport them to the age of innocence; their evil natures are already well cultivated…. Although the play has its own independent life, it is remarkably enhanced by our foreknowledge of the despicable and fascinating Hubbards. (p. 162)

Another Part of the Forest does not match the earlier play in concentrated power. Miss Hellman has followed too many paths. If fewer crises had been packed into the two days, if the voices had been less strident, if the massacre had not repeatedly haunted them and us, if the action had centered less on the detectivelike pursuit, the Hubbard and Bagtry portraits could have been more fully realized, and our hearts might have become more committed. Miss Hellman's taut web does not snare us as it snares the Hubbards. We follow their greedy machinations with a cold eye as if watching a Brecht-like epic.

Miss Hellman has mined a rich lode from the Hubbards' history, perhaps too rich in dark deeds for a single evening. Yet even if overloaded with villainy, Another Part of the Forest is a strong and exciting play. (p. 177)

[Hellman's adaptation of Roblès' play entitled] Montserrat signaled a change in her career. She had not before drawn on remote history; she had not done an adaptation. Of her five plays that followed, three, The Lark, Candide, and My Mother, My Father and Me, were adaptations, and the first two drew on history or fictionalized history. (p. 191)

In total, her alterations and deviations from Roblès' text were minor and minimal. She divided the play into two acts rather than three, changed Elena's name to Felisa, La Mère to Matilde, and introduced the opening chess-playing scene. Her greatest change was in reducing the discursive passages, the extended philosophical speculations on the nature of freedom. She knew that Americans had a lower tolerance than the French for such disputations. At the same time, her Montserrat became less an activist and more a tortured and skeptical intellectual whose revolutionary ideas have been nurtured by books. Her Izquierdo, villainous as he is, has been stripped of his most vicious racist sentiments. In the original he proposed to exterminate all Indian young men to make the future safe for Spain. Roblès' ghost of Hitler is more visible.

Miss Hellman sought a stronger base in believable reality by tempering the melodramatic commitments of the principals. She focused more strongly on what is done, Roblès on what is said about what is done. She heightened the theatrical effect of the executions with a longer death march, with the accompaniment of His Excellency's piano in the background. Still her play is talky; our heads are engaged more strongly than our hearts. We appreciate the plight of the pathetic hostages; we never know them well enough to be moved by their destruction. We admire Montserrat's heroic resistance, yet we are not magnetized by him and his cause, partly because—and this is the major weakness of the play—we never know Bolivar. Unless well tutored in advance on Bolivar and the Spanish invasion, our hearts are not warmed to the spiritual importance of the revolution, and thus the effects appear mechanical and the carnage gratuitous.

The play does not meet Miss Hellman's usual standard. The writing seems barren and uninspired. In the single line of action, the underdeveloped characters, the laborious repetition of the impasse between Izquierdo and Montserrat, we miss the lifelike richness of the earlier plays. The deficiencies can, of course, be charged only partly to her. (pp. 197-98)

As if to compensate for her own political activism, ulterior and political overtones were excluded [from The Autumn Garden]. No background canvas of world events is required; the context is supplied by Miss Hellman's own text. If Ibsen had guided her hand in weaving the strands and tightening the knots in the past, here she has turned to Chekhov…. The portraits are drawn with subtle, impressionistic strokes. The characters wander aimlessly, following their inclinations rather than hers, seeking in their October years to fathom the mysteries of their past lives, to discover solace in the present. As in the two plays about the Hubbards, she has drawn from her family memory book but from later pages. She has abandoned the old South and jumped to the present—the Tuckerman summer resort on the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles from New Orleans, in September, 1949. And instead of crowding the play with tense, touch-and-go crises, with tormenting questions about how, when, and who will win, she has gently enfolded us and the characters in a Chekhovian spell. Some critics thought that Chekhov served her even better than Ibsen, regretted that she had not called on him earlier, that she did not call on him again. (pp. 203-04)

The lost souls wandering in Miss Hellman's autumn garden are trapped in the lives they have made, and though they have not yet abandoned their dreams, final resignation seems pitifully near. Miss Hellman is reciting the universal human experience. Sometime in the middle years every man is awakened to what might have been and struggles to give his dreams a last chance. (p. 213)

The Autumn Garden is certainly Miss Hellman's most original, most probing, most mature, and many would say, her best play. She has captured the universal human experience of the middle years: the last desperate grasp at the dreams of what might have been, the sad and inexorable discovery that time and habit have fixed a mold that cannot be broken. (pp. 225-26)

The play was rich in Chekhovian qualities, yet she had missed a Chekhov essential. In his plays, no matter how stupid, silly, and petty the characters might be, they were invariably lovable people because Chekhov loved them. In her play the glow of love was missing…. (p. 227)

Perhaps her moralistic compulsion prevented her from adopting the Chekhov line. Thoroughgoing realist that he was, Chekhov rarely endowed his characters with the strength to face the truth about themselves. Hellman felt compelled to make her people confront their weaknesses and suffer from what they saw. (pp. 227-28)

Miss Hellman retained the basic pattern of [Anouilh's play L'Alouette in her version, The Lark]; her alterations and deviations were not radical but they were incisive. She reduced the discursive arguments, dramatized rather than reasoned her way through the sacred mystery, changed the ending, added a biting briskness, and energized the proceedings with an emotional charge that was absent in Anouilh…. (p. 247)

Miss Hellman gives a vibrating theatrical crescendo to the final moment. Just as we have suffered Joan's agony, we glory in reliving her happiest day. Compared to the original, it may seem unduly loaded with cheerful sentimentality, but it rings true for a Joan who is to be declared a saint for all the world. (pp. 266-67)

As closely as Miss Hellman followed the characters and pattern of Anouilh, her idiom makes the play her own. Her characters speak in action and in words of action; they never talk like books. She deprives them of their voluminous excursions into theology. Fascinating as these may be for classes in the seminary or monastery, they impede the story of Joan in the theatre. Her country girl with all her gamin vitality and her earthy shrewdness must stand in the forefront battling against the priests who futilely attempt to vanquish her soul. That action must command the center of the arena. Anouilh devotees may protest that she's altered his text too radically. The point need not be argued. She labeled her version an adaptation…. (p. 267)

Miss Hellman maintains a bold, sincere, and often solemn sense of reality throughout, the fictive reality of the theatre that welcomes involvement, that establishes its own terms of credibility. Anouilh alternates between the long discursive passages, more his than his characters', and the scenes from Joan's life which he maintained were "truer than the real thing" because he laced them with skepticism and irony. Miss Hellman makes the shifts from the trial to the flashback episodes sharper and more precise, employing the powers of the theatre's lighting artists. And each flashback has its own illusionistic reality. Anouilh wanders in and out of the trial much more casually.

Anouilh's Joan was less endowed with magic and mystery, depending more on her powers as a woman to rally the soldiers, and certainly was more arrogant and vain as she faced her final torment. "For me," Miss Hellman once commented, "Joan was too big to be concerned with vanity. Death is the most dramatic choice a person can make. Very few have made it. I just couldn't see Joan going to the stake out of arrogance." She could not retract her confession because she feared the humiliation of growing old in prison, dowdy, and forgotten. Nor is her Joan exclusively a French nationalist. She belongs to the world and her sacred mystery belongs to the world. (pp. 267-68)

With the solemn sense of truth that pervaded the play, the absence of theatrical guile, Miss Hellman had enlisted the theatre's special genius for exploring sacred mysteries, for dramatizing the relationship between man and God. The steamroller power drawn up against Joan could not vanquish her soul. (pp. 268-69)

All the whirlpools and eddies in Voltaire's roaring river could not find a place in Miss Hellman's [Candide], though some were in and then out, supplanted by lyrics and music. A few characters were slightly altered, some contemporary satirical thrusts were added, but essentially, people, places, and episodes were drawn from Voltaire. Hellman's naive Candide may be more a disillusioned hero and less a blithering idiot; but as in the original, he gradually emerges from his pious illusions as he encounters the viciousness of the ordinary world. Her Cunegonde, though not thoroughly virtuous, is certainly more ladylike than Voltaire's ready opportunist. And though the evils of the world are more fully documented in Voltaire, his assault on optimism is faithfully preserved, if with less irony and less bite. (p. 272)

Miss Hellman was not trained for the brisk telegraphic style demanded by the musical theatre. With her text radically reduced, her satiric thrusts seemed too dull, cumbersome, and serious for the mocking lyricism of Bernstein's score and the verbal playfulness of Wilbur's lyrics. As one critic remarked, she had blunted Voltaire's cutting edge. Where he had been ironic and bland, she became explicit and vigorous. Instead of lightning thrusts, she employed body blows. Where he had been diabolical, she became humanitarian. She had been trapped into making Candide a romantic hero rather than the absurd and gullible victim of his philosophical miseducation…. [Her] acceptance of war, greed, treachery, venery, snobbishness, and mendacity as staples of civilization—true as they were to the twentieth century—seemed too cynical. And her timely attacks on such traditional enemies as aristocracy, puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitorial investigations, and brave-new-world optimism appeared heavy-handed. (p. 283)

Toys in the Attic is one of Miss Hellman's best plays; some declared it her most mature play…. [She] marshaled the dramatic powers that had served her in the past, tempered the melodramatic excesses, enriched her characters with a luminous, if neurotic, humanity, and bound them tightly and irrevocably to their destructive course. She enfolded them in the decaying atmosphere of the South that she knew by instinct, though the locale served only to give the ring of truth. Home for Julian and his child bride could have been anywhere.

The Berniers, like the Hubbards, hanker for worldly comforts, but they're driven by love, not by avarice and greed…. Like the sad dreamers in Autumn Garden, they are bound in a web of self-deception. Success for Julian is not the rainbow's end it seemed to be. Love can harbor devastating winds. Dreams fulfilled lose their magic when they cease to be dreams.

The play achieves the magnitude and human revelation that have always been the mark of serious drama…. It is the work of a dedicated professional who knows her powers and uses them. The language is honed to a sharp edge. Incidents evolve with a cold and clear serpentine grace and become so tightly intertwined that they cannot be sprung apart…. Every dramatic hair is in place; nothing is superfluous, every dramatic gesture contributes to the central action. Her characters are original creations. They may not be lovable; they are believable and brutally alive. We may not find comfort in their company; we are fascinated by their pathetic, neurotic lives. We may never stake a full emotional investment in them; yet we can never turn our eyes away. Sorry as we are to see Julian's toys shattered, our moral sensibilities are not really shocked: we never believed that this boy-man, this blowhard weakling, had the capacity for becoming a whole man. (pp. 305-06)

If the play misses being her best, it barely misses. The flaws are not distracting to the naked eye in the theatre. Some critics thought she loitered too long with Anna and Carrie at the beginning before setting her dramatic trap. Others were disturbed when she seemed to shift from her inquiry into the moral consequences of Julian's adventure to a treatise on abnormal psychology. She should not attempt to write on two levels. If she wished to draw on Freud, she should have gone further. Julian could have discovered the true nature of Carrie's love for him, reviled himself for his own weakness, and then attempted to purge himself of this hidden evil and failed. This was not, of course, Miss Hellman's way. She was less concerned with stirring our human sympathies than in exposing the quality of life as she saw it, in showing us the destructive powers of love, showing us that well-meaning souls can often inflict more harm than those possessed with evil. (pp. 306-07)

If Miss Hellman's comedy [My Mother, My Father and Me] seemed dark and grotesque, it was not so brutally sardonic as the novel [by Burt Blechman from which she created the play]. Although she adopted the main line of action and the principal characters from How Much?, her satiric thrusts ranged more widely…. (p. 326)

The dialogue, neat and sharp as usual, belongs almost exclusively to Hellman, as do the savage verbal assaults on the corruptions in family life, at the insane tribal rites of the restless beatniks, at psychiatrists, at the hyperbolic consumer instinct, and at the slick shysters who operate homes for the aged. Unfortunately the massive mixture of angry and sardonic truths becomes too oppressive. She has pursued the pretensions and frauds of our world so fiercely, jumping from target to target, that we feel no compassion for the objects of her scorn, there is no mirth in our laughter…. Her cartoon monsters are caught in a middle world somewhere between the plausible nonsense of You Can't Take It With You and the exotic insanities of the absurdists. When Miss Hellman abandoned her customary discipline and craftsmanship, she loosened the reins with a vengeance. If she had a larger purpose, to say that these frauds and pretensions were the inevitable corruptions of affluence, that message was lost. (p. 327)

An Unfinished Woman is not a conventional autobiography…. (p. 346)

Only in the first third of the book does she allow chronology to govern her narrative. After that she swings freely among her remembrances of places, times, and people—all intimately observed, all colored with some special personal involvement. As one critic commented, it was "a technique that would be pure quicksand in the hands of a writer less sure of her mind." With her sure mind and her firm literary hand, the technique gave a simultaneity to her daydreaming. It was as if the reader had been invited to share a few hours with her, hours of private remembering.

Frank and honest as she is in juxtaposing the odd pieces of her life, never self-caressing, never attempting to charm or ingratiate herself, and strongly as one senses her aversion to sham and pretense, she often stops short of a full revelation. We may learn that she has a low tolerance for phonies and phoniness, that she disdains the so-called sophisticated life, that she admires "people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak," but large stretches of her remembered landscape are shielded from view. When she approaches them, she frequently turns aside with an enigmatic, "We were never to speak of that again." If at times we wish she would say more, she somehow makes us understand that she's sketching a reluctant subject who cannot yet tolerate a definitive portrait. As she said once, she has no enthusiasm for being a bookkeeper of her life. (pp. 346-47)

She has never written better prose. Throughout it has a spare and muscular, often tough, rationality, warmed by a loving hand. Many anecdotes and episodes are dramatized as if for a play, with the same pithy dialogue she had mastered for the theatre. (pp. 347-48)

Richard Moody, in his Lillian Hellman: Playwright (© 1976 by Richard Moody; reprinted by permission of the author), Bobbs-Merrill-Pegasus, 1974, 372 p.