A FAMILY AFFAIR.

Lillian Hellman's penultimate play, "Toys in the Attic" (now in revival at the Pearl Theatre Company), first produced in 1960, is as creaky as an old four-poster bed. Though it can be pleasant to rest for a moment in its carefully embroidered sheets--if only to be reminded of the familiar scents with which Hellman sprinkled her most autobiographical work: incest, miscegenation, and camellias--the play's charm is musty and, in the end, tiresome. In fact, "Toys in the Attic" is so thin that you may find yourself supplementing the onstage drama with the real family history on which it is based. Hellman's father, Max, who was Jewish, was doted on by his two spinster sisters. After the shoe business that he'd established in New Orleans with the help of his wife's money went under, Max became a travelling haberdashery salesman. (The Hellmans spent part of every year in New York until Lillian was a teen-ager.) According to Hellman lore, Max's sisters, who ran a series of boarding houses, were thrifty and repressed, dour and witty. It's interesting to note that the only significant invention in "Toys in the Attic" is the dialogue, which, as Joan Mellen points out in "Hellman and Hammett," her eminently readable 1996 study, was helped along by the writer Dashiell Hammett, Hellman's companion for many years, who also suggested part of the plot.

In the play, Carrie Berniers (Rachel Botchan) is an unmarried middle-aged office worker who lives in a large house with her sister, Anna (Robin Leslie Brown), who is also unmarried. The Berniers sisters yearn to travel to Europe. But their finances--like their joined lives--make this dream prohibitive. So, instead, they cleave to their routine, discussing what to have for dinner, complaining about the boss, and lamenting the absence of their younger brother, Julian (Sean McNall). But not for long. Near the middle of the first act, Julian arrives for a visit, with his somewhat distracted bride, Lily (Ivy Vahanian), in tow. A sweet dreamer and a failure, Julian wears an ice-cream-colored suit and is all elbows and knees, jutting out into space with the restless impertinence of a boy anxious to become a man. And now, finally, he has a chance to live up to his fantasy and be one: through circumstances that remain unclear for much of the play, Julian has made some money in a business arrangement that he refuses to discuss. He has enough cash to send Carrie and Anna on their long-desired trip, thereby repaying them for the many times they have bailed him out of less profitable ventures. But Carrie and Anna have a hard time believing in his newfound glory, no matter how much he tries to convince them. "Look. It's going to be this way," he says emphatically. "The first money is for us to have things. Have fun. After that, I promise you, we'll invest. And like all people with money, we'll make more and more and more until we get sick of it. Rich people get sick more than we do. Maybe from worry." The real worry, however, for Carrie, at least, is that Julian, by taking a stand and actually fulfilling his sisters' wishes, is detaching himself from them and will no longer be available to her as the feckless object of her incestuous desire. If Julian became his own man, Carrie's control over her siblings would be lost.

Had Hellman stopped there--that is, written a play about the financial and sexual poisons that can infect a man's relationship to himself, as well as to his siblings--she would have produced a strong, dark work with minor Chekhovian undertones. (Hellman edited a collection of Chekhov's letters in 1955.) But she was a creature of fashion first and foremost. She knew what she was talking about when she remarked, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1952, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." Of course, this is exactly what she did--as a writer. "Toys" is full of borrowings from the work that ...