Theatre in Review: Hellman v. McCarthy (Abingdon Theatre Company)

	Photo: Kim T. Sharp

The title bout may be Hellman v. McCarthy, but the laurels go to the referee, Dick Cavett. Brian Richard Mori's new play, about one of the 20th century's great literary catfights, is framed as an episode of The Dick Cavett Show, for the very good reason that it is where the hostilities began, and the producers of Hellman v. McCarthy have procured the services of Cavett himself. Now in his late 70s, he has lost none of the easy charm, understated wit, and drop-dead timing that marked his years on television. (Commenting on our seemingly endless winter, he says, "It's so cold out that the Central Park flashers are just describing themselves." With his dry delivery, it gets a substantial laugh.)

It was on a 1979 episode of Cavett's PBS series that Mary McCarthy, the novelist and critic known and feared for her verbal hit jobs, said of Lillian Hellman, "I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman, who always gave as good as she got, promptly slapped McCarthy with a lawsuit, demanding $2.25 million in damages for "mental pain and anguish." (Cavett, his production company, and PBS also got named.) The suit dragged on for five years, in Jarndyce-vs.-Jarndyce fashion, all but bankrupting McCarthy and arguably dealing a decisive blow to Hellman's failing health. It ended only with her death.

The affair was the talk of literary New York, and in 2003 was dramatized by Nora Ephron in the Broadway play Imaginary Friends, which, employing a battery of theatrical devices, including musical numbers, puppets, and video, somehow failed to totally satisfy. Swoosie Kurtz (Hellman) and Cherry Jones (McCarthy) made a zesty pair of antagonists, but you could feel Ephron struggling to make an engaging comic drama out of such intransigent material.

Mori's much more narrowly focused work also struggles to find drama in what amounts to a series of legal briefs and depositions. We are dutifully reminded of the 1948 encounter at Sarah Lawrence College that probably made them enemies for life. Mori makes clear that their difference of opinion regarding the Communist Party -- Hellman defended Stalin long after it was reasonable to do so, a position that earned McCarthy's most withering scorn -- while also slyly demonstrating that no room could ever hold two such alpha females. (He also notes the irony of Hellman, for most of her life a fierce advocate for free speech, instigating a lawsuit that could have had a chilling effect on the public expression of opinion.) But the very nature of the story resists dramatization, and most of Hellman v. McCarthy is bogged down by a she said/she said structure, allowing each woman to rail against the other while the litigation moves at a glacial pace.

To inject some crackle into the proceedings, Mori invents a scene in which Hellman and McCarthy meet to try and settle matters between them. (Hellman is expecting an explicit apology from McCarthy, which, as it happens, is not forthcoming.) Of course, it never took place; think of it as the equivalent of the fictional royal showdown in Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart. Some sparks fly in the encounter, to be sure. "I'm more famous than you; I'm richer than you," says Hellman. "Spoken like a true Socialist," observes McCarthy. "I'm not a Socialist. I was never a Socialist. I'm a Marxist," replies Hellman, as if that explains everything.

Even here, however, there are strange gaps. The women discuss McCarthy's marriage to "Edmund" without making clear that they are referring to the literary critic (and abusive husband and world-class womanizer) Edmund Wilson. Oddly, McCarthy brings up the matter of "Julia" without going into any detail about it. In 1983, Muriel Gardiner, an American psychiatrist, accused Hellman of stealing the details of her wartime experiences, fashioning them into the "Julia" section of Pentimento, a book that was billed as a memoir. Gardiner's accusations, coming at a time when Hellman's truthfulness had already come into question, were especially damaging. It's surprising that Mori doesn't explain it more clearly; Hellman v. McCarthy will be best enjoyed by audiences who have boned up on these literary ladies or who were there and still remember the controversies involved.

But if Hellman v. McCarthy makes for halting, disjointed drama, it is nevertheless often a stimulating and amusing experience, thanks to fine performances and some stellar displays of bad behavior. Roberta Maxwell's Hellman is an ailing old crone who cheats at Scrabble when Ryan, her nurse-companion, is out of the room, and whose idea of adopting a healthy regimen is to cut back to four packs of cigarettes a day. Idly asking Ryan about his personal life, he starts to gush about his boyfriend; he barely completes one sentence before she cuts him off, snapping, "Sorry I asked." Running into Cavett at a cocktail party, clad in the mink from the famous Blackglama ad, she excoriates him for not defending her against McCarthy, then breezily explains why Johnny Carson is so much better at the talk show game. She declines physically from scene to scene, as if being poisoned by her own fury and bile.

As McCarthy, Marcia Rodd is quite the performer, always ready to strike a smiling pose and slash a reputation. Defending her actions, she says, in all innocence, "He asked me a question about hacks -- literary hacks -- in general, and Hellman's name came readily to mind." Offering Hellman some water, she adds, "I didn't put poison in it, if that's what you were thinking." But we also see her distress as the legal bills pile up and she is forced to mortgage her house to finance her defense. What began as an amusing tiff for the New York Review of Books crowd ended up having very real consequences.

Jan Buttram's uneven direction lets the three stars go through their paces, while the members of the supporting cast struggle with their shakily written roles. Andrew Lu's all-white set design is reasonably attractive, but I wonder if a more functional ground plan might have been devised for this multiple-location script. In any case, it is nicely lit by Travis McHale. Jane Greenwood's costumes bring back the fashions of the early '80s, for better or for worse; she has also devised starkly contrasting looks for the leading ladies. Ian Wehrle's sound design includes voiceovers of the Cavett broadcast and New York Voices-style vocal jazz between the scenes.

And Cavett presides delightfully throughout, offering color commentary and even briefly taking audience questions after the show. At the performance I attended, he made a fascinating observation: The only reason he posed that fateful question is because McCarthy had requested that he ask her to name underrated writers: She planned to plug a young author whose work she admired. But when the question came, she apparently blanked, and, to cover the moment, Cavett asked her who she thought was overrated. But for that tiny slip, they might not all have been entangled in years of ruinous litigation. -- David Barbour