Sunday afternoon’s performance of Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” proved what NIU’s theater department is capable of achieving. The play, as brought to life by 10 undergraduate and graduate actors, expressed the attainment of power as a force capable of tearing a family apart.

-Addie (Shayla Jarvis) swept across the stage as a broken remnant of the southern aristocracy. As Addie is mentally and physically abused by her husband Oscar (G. Scott Brown), the play becomes less a story about the turmoil surrounding a family and begins to display the roots of the American Dream.

Rachel Miller infused Regina Hubbard with the ferocious intensity that eventually would beckon the rise of the middle class. Miller allowed the character’s own life to envelop the metaphorical role and portrayed Regina with the overpowering force that Hellman intended.

“I thought it was really well acted,” said Ben Thomas, a project service aide for Human Resources.

Brown and Hoskuldur Saemundsson brought the brotherly bond between Oscar and Ben Hubbard to the stage with a clarity that revealed the inherent rivalry that boiled beneath the surface.

The NIU theater has brought to the stage a stunning production of “Little Foxes.” The only fault the play suffers from is a chronic ailment that seems to plague NIU’s theater department. The accents in the play were scattered at times and inconsistent. Leo Hubbard (Alex Gunn), son of Oscar, had an accent that clearly marked him as being from a different region of the South than his father.

When the tension would rise on stage, the dialect of the characters would slip to a northern tone. Although this could be held against the play, the emotion that the actors throw into the tense moments all but makes up for the slight slips.

“It’s all in the family and will stay in the family,” Ben Hubbard said.

Let’s hope that the theater department can do the same with its incoming students because the performers in “Little Foxes” have set the bar high for them.