THE LOOP — It’s probably not surprising that when the Goodman Theatre chose a Hyde Parker to direct a play it was a classic of political theater.
“Little Foxes,” the Lillian Hellman play laced with critiques of American-style capitalism opens Monday under the direction of Henry Wishcamper, a relative newcomer to the neighborhood but someone who seems to be fitting right in.
The director, now on his sixth production at the Goodman, is still fresh to the neighborhood, moving to 55th and Harper Avenue in 2013. So when it was time to grapple with the play’s central critique of capitalism, Wishcamper turned not to Hyde Park’s intellectual heritage, but his own experience as a temp working in private equity and hedge fund firms in New York.
“Part of that world is about avarice, but part of it is also about winning, that it’s all a game,” Wishcamper said of his time from 1999 to 2009 watching the booms and busts of the technology and real estate markets from inside major financial institutions.
The central story of “Little Foxes” follows three siblings fighting for control of a deal to build a cotton mill and how the competition corrupts the siblings’ relationship and eventually ruptures the family.
He said he saw no immunity in the financial sector to the desire for revenge that infects the play’s character, Regina, and ultimately corrupts her.
Maybe it’s not strange then for Wishcamper to take up a play that includes a character that is a banker who has a deathbed conversion and vows do no more evil with his money.
Far away from Wall Street, Wishcamper said he’s seen during the previews that Chicago audiences are actually far savvier about the complex financial deal at the heart of the siblings’ conflict than he ever expected.
“People are finding jokes in the financial transactions I didn’t know existed,” Wishcamper said. “People really seem to get how the deal is being financed — it’s really strange.”
Set in 1900, the play is an often-funny critique of how American capitalism, which struggles to balance aspiration with avarice, tears apart a family while ricocheting off issues of race and gender.
“It’s a pretty perfect play for Hyde Park,” Wishcamper said, who has been working for the last year on the adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play from 1939.
Perhaps unbeknownst to Wishcamper, the issues the play attempts to tackle in a single sitting read like one of the more ambitious agendas from a Hyde Park community meeting.
“We’re leaning into a lot of the uncomfortable things, like the racial things — we’re not pushing the brakes,” Wishcamper said.
The adaptation restores all the racial epithets removed from the 1941 film version.
“That makes the movie feel more racist to me,” Wishcamper said.
He said the film tried to show an idealized South, when Hellman was trying to depict the reality of how oppressive the day-to-day interactions between blacks and wealthy whites could be.
“It’s really shocking and it’s our history,” Wishcamper said. “It was really important to me and the cast that this not feel like a very old-fashioned depiction, this is something that is still very much a reality.”
“Little Foxes” is currently in previews. It opens Monday and runs through June 7.
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