Lillian Hellman’s second play, Days to Come, is a family drama set against the backdrop of labor strife in a small Ohio town which threatens to tear apart both town and family. “It’s the story of innocent people on both sides who are drawn into conflict and events far beyond their comprehension,” Hellman said in an interview before Days to Come opened in 1936. “It’s the saga of a man who started something he cannot stop…”

Andrew Rodman is running the family business and failing at it. The workers are out on strike and things are getting desperate.

“Papa would have known what to do,” his sister Cora nags, “and without wasting time and money.”

“The strike, these people here—it’s wrong for you,” his wife Julie advises, “It doesn’t make any difference who wins—”

But it’s too late. Rodman is bringing in strikebreakers, naively failing to anticipate the disastrous impact that this will have on his family and their place in the community where they have lived for generations.

Audiences had no chance to appreciate Days to Come when it premiered on Broadway in 1936; it closed after a week. Hellman blamed herself for the play’s failure. “I wanted to say too much,” she wrote in a preface to the published play in 1942—while admitting that her director was confused and her cast inadequate. “On the opening night the actors moved as figures in the dream of a frightened child. It was my fault, I suppose, that it happened.” Nevertheless, “I stand firmly on the side of Days to Come.” In 1942, Hellman could afford to take responsibility for the play’s failure; she had enjoyed much success in the days after Days to Come (with both The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine.) But Hellman’s play is better than she would admit.

Days to Come was revived only once in New York, in 1978, by the WPA Theatre. In reviewing that production for The Nation, Harold Clurman wrote that “our knowledge of what Hellman would subsequently write reveals that Days to Come is not mainly concerned with the industrial warfare which is the ‘stuff’ of her story for the first two acts.” Hellman’s real preoccupation is “the lack of genuine values of mind or spirit” of her principle characters, the factory-owning Rodmans.

Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come (now at the Mint Theater Company) was not a success when it premiered in New York in 1936. In fact, this second play of the Hellman canon (after The Children’s Hour) was a full-tilt disaster. The three-act drama (played briskly here in two hours, with a single intermission) presents the tale of a prominent though struggling family, the Rodmans, who own a factory in a small Ohio town called Callom. They manufacture brushes of some sort—whether paintbrushes, hairbrushes or some other sort is never made clear. Andrew Rodman (Larry Bull) has always had familial feelings about the people who work for him. Nevertheless, he and his friend and attorney, Henry Ellicott (Ted Deasy), enlist a squad of strikebreakers to help install scabs following a walk-out by the regular employees. A union organizer, Leo Whalen (Roderick Hill), urges the striking workers to behave peaceably, but the strikebreakers goad them to violence. Much of the play is focused on the Rodman family dynamic. The personal failings of the family members wind up impacting all of Collum. Andrew, though kindhearted, is passive and indecisive. His sister, Cora (Mary Bacon), is flighty, self-absorb …Read more