"You gone stark out of your head?" asks Addie, the all-knowing housemaid, in the first line of Lillian Hellman's pot-boiler The Little Foxes. And for the next two hours, that question is answered in the affirmative by almost every character in the play, which concerns a backstabbing, social-climbing Alabama family and their avaricious struggle to get the money to build a cotton mill on their plantation in the year 1900. Hellman's play opened on Broadway in 1939 with the legendary Tallulah Bankhead in the lead role of Regina Giddens, the ruthless woman who refuses to be cheated out of a windfall by her equally ruthless brothers. In an engrossing new production at New York Theatre Workshop from Flemish director Ivo van Hove, Regina is portrayed by Elizabeth Marvel, whose past collaborations with van Hove have proven particularly exhilarating, such as an unforgettable production of Hedda Gabler in 2006, and his visionary staging of A Streetcar Named Desire more ›

Elizabeth Marvel first knocked our socks off six years ago when we saw Ivo van Hove's inspired, visceral interpretation of Hedda Gabler at New York Theater Workshop. Ever since, she's been reason enough to see pretty much anything, from Top Girls to The Good Wife. Don't ask us to articulate what makes her so eminently watchable, just go see Marvel for yourself starting next week at the Public Theater, where she's playing the title role in The Book of Grace, the new one from Suzan-Lori Parks—you know, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such hits as Topdog/Underdog. more ›

Filmmaker Ethan Coen has left his big brother behind and written three short plays all by himself. Called Almost an Evening, the triptych will be produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with a terrific cast that includes Elizabeth Marvel, who was riveting in Ivo van Hove’s unforgettable revival of Hedda Gabler, and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham. The plays “unsuccessfully tackle important questions. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four... more ›