(Michael Feingold’s article appeared in the Village Voice, 6/8.)
Conveniently arriving in the same week, two rarely seen plays from the American past, both written by strong-minded, leftward-leaning women, supply a kind of kick that today's theater needs—a good, swift kick to one of today's biggest potential targets, corporate paternalism. Both works premiered at pivotal historical moments: Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford's Can You Hear Their Voices? in 1931, as the Depression swept across the country, and Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman's prequel to her prewar hit, The Little Foxes, in 1946, just as we began to take stock of ourselves after World War II.
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