Hamilton is an educator with significant experience in drama and secondary curricula. In this essay she compares Hellman's play to classic Greek drama.
In interviews Hellman has acknowledged her debt to Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov as models of dramatic structure (she even edited an anthology of Chekhov's letters), but she never articulated her ties to classic Greek theater, the ultimate source of the genre called tragedy. Yet the two plays of her planned but uncompleted trilogy, The Little Foxes and its "prequel," Another Part of the Forest, show considerable resemblance to classic Greek tragedy, especially to Aeschylus's trilogy, the Orestiea. At the same time, Hellman's plays truly represent their time period, the modernist era, in their cynicism and their lack of a true heroic figure. On top of that, the quietly disturbing condemnation of passivity.....
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