When last we heard from the cutthroat Hubbard clan, sister Regina was pulling a fast one on brothers Ben and Oscar. That was three years ago, when 2nd Story Theatre staged Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, which tells of the battles between the ruthless Hubbard siblings.

Now the Warren theater is putting on the prequel to Little Foxes, Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, which drops in on the Hubbards 20 years earlier, in a small Alabama town, as Ben goes up against his tyrannical father, Marcus.

It’s quite a battle, one that leaves more than its share of casualties. It’s also one in which the audience wins out, an enormously entertaining show that despite its two intermissions, whizzes by. It’s a fascinating study in greed and the quest for power among people who were raised to go for the jugular.

One reason it flies by is the crisp direction from Ed Shea, and some fine performances from the cast, especially Vince Petronio as the imperious Marcus Hubbard, who made a fortune during the Civil War selling salt to the troops at inflated prices. Marcus is a self-made man, who came from poverty and taught himself Greek while working in the fields. He rules over the Hubbard manse with an iron first, but he is also vulnerable. He is hiding a dark secret from his past, and when Ben finds out the details, he threatens to ruin his father.

It’s a grand tale, one told superbly by Hellman, the master of cogent and compelling dialogue.

Marcus is, for example, a wonderful study in contrasts. He’s an unscrupulous profiteer who likes nothing better than spending the evening playing Mozart. He fancies himself a man of some breeding, but treats his kids like dirt and dismisses his fragile wife, Lavinia, a religious fanatic who wants nothing more than to run a school for black children.

The only one of his children he’s close to is 20-year-old Regina, who knows how to lay on the Southern charm when it suits her purpose.

Gabby Sherba, who played Regina’s daughter Alexandra in 2nd Story’s Little Foxes, is terrific as the young Regina, coming across as coquettish one moment and a shrew the next. It’s a wonderful self-assured performance with lots of edge, one of the best Sherba has given at 2nd Story.

Lynne Collinson also deserves a hand for her portrayal of long-suffering Lavinia, the wife who holds the secret to her husband’s past and is, despite her sweet nature, not above playing family politics when it comes to a showdown with Marcus. She seems innocent, a woman with a delicate emotional make up who is concerned only about things spiritual. But when it comes to getting her way, to funding her school and getting money to support her aged maid, Coralee, she is just as ruthless as the rest of the Hubbards.

Hers is a well-shaded performance that reveals just how dysfunctional the family is.

But no one is nastier than Coleman Crenshaw’s Ben, who spends the play just waiting to make his move. Both sons, Ben and Oscar, work in the family store for slave wages. While Oscar is the dim-witted member of the family, an illiterate who has the hots for a crude prostitute, Ben is the schemer, the guy who is trying to marry Regina into money and take advantage of the neighbors’ financial problems.

He’s the one who knows that Regina is carrying on an affair with Mark Gentsch’s John Bagtry, the cavalry officer whose fondest memories are fighting for the South. At 36, he’s an empty shell of a man who tries to convince Regina to hook up with someone else, while he heads off to Brazil to fight in yet another war.

The whole show is a little like the long-running TV soap, Dallas. Think of Ben as the manipulative J.R. Ewing, but without a wife to abuse. Crenshaw’s Ben is hard, uncaring and cold, someone who has followed in the footsteps of his cruel father.

All this is played out on the porch of Trevor Elliot’s Hubbard homestead, a set that looks more like a Newport condo than an antebellum mansion. That fact that there is a set at all is a little unexpected, though. Back in the summer, director Shea said he was doing away with sets altogether, that they got in the way of the language and were too costly.

But for this detailed, realistic drama, he wanted a detailed, realistic backdrop. So he planted a façade of a house in one of the sections of seats, which are laid out in the round. The move, a welcome one, has cut out about 40 seats, making the theater all the more intimate.

The other nice touch are Ron Cesario’s lush period costumes, especially Regina’s elegant gowns.

Don’t go looking for a lot of hidden meaning in this play, though. Another Part of the Forest is just a great tale, well told by Shea and his actors.

It’s been three years since then 17-year-old Gabby Sherba played Alexandra Giddens in 2nd Story Theatre’s production of The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman’s look at the machinations of the cutthroat Hubbard clan.

She played opposite Joanne Fayan’s ruthless Regina Hubbard Giddens, the mother who blackmailed her two brothers for a stake in the family cotton mill. Sweet Alexandra was turned off by her mother’s manipulative behavior and in the end lost all respect for her.

Now Sherba gets to play the heavy. Beginning tomorrow she will take a turn as the young Regina in the prequel to The Little Foxes, Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, which opens in previews at 2nd Story. The two roles are like night and day, yet one has informed the other.

“I learned so much about Regina by playing someone who was afflicted by her horrible nature,” said Sherba. “By the time Regina was old enough to have a 17-year-old daughter she had stomped out all the good in her makeup.”

As a young woman in Another Part of the Forest, Regina is well on her way to becoming the evil presence in Little Foxes. Director Ed Shea said Sherba has had to learn to tap into her dark side for this role. He’s not sure she would have been able to do that three years ago.

“Just watching Gabby, she gets it,” said Shea. “The same softness she had for Alexandra she replaced with this incredible hardness. She gets the ruthlessness.

“And I’m glad we are doing the plays in the order we are, because a couple of years ago I’m not sure she would have gotten it. Just three years have made a big difference. By the time you get to be Gabby’s age, she’s seen that hardness, she knows it.”

For Sherba it has been something of a stretch to play such a merciless character.

“It’s been a struggle identifying with someone who approaches situations in a way I have never approached situations in my life. She looks at the way someone is going to be hurt by what she does and perfects her weapon.

“I function by identifying with souls and nurturing them. She finds souls and destroys them.”

One thing Sherba has had to do in the show is find her own voice as the young Regina. She is not basing her performance on what Fayan did with the role in Little Foxes. She is not trying to be a younger version of that character.

“That was her performance,” said Sherba. “It was unique and great. But I’ve had to find my own Regina, and it’s been an awesome journey.”

Hellman wrote Another Part of the Forest in 1946, seven years after her Little Foxes. The play takes place in the Deep South of 1880, in a fictitious Alabama town.

Patriarch Marcus Hubbard has made a fortune from profiteering during the Civil War.

“He’s not for either side,” said Shea. “He’s for himself.”

But Marcus has a dark past and when his older son Ben learns about it, he threatens to destroy him.

Meanwhile Regina is having an affair with her neighbor, a cavalry officer with emotional scars from the war.

“She is very mercurial,” said Shea. “She can turn from coquette to shrew on a dime.”

Even though the plots of the two plays are intertwined, Shea said you can see Another Part of the Forest without any knowledge of Little Foxes. Each play stands on its own.

“It’s astounding how she has tied them together and that you don’t have to know both.”

Shea has also made some changes in the performance space at 2nd Story. During the summer, he put on two shows without sets. Actors delivered their lines while parading along an intersecting pine boardwalk, with the audience seated in four wedges that filled the corners of the theater. At the time, Shea said sets tend to get in the way of the writing and become a distraction. Besides, they cost a lot at a time when donations are sure to suffer due to the tanking economy.

But he has changed his mind.

“I get bored,” he said.

Now he has built a realistic set for Another Part of the Forest, the façade of the Hubbard’s house placed in front of one of the four sections of seats, thus reducing the number of chairs from about 150 to 120.

“That 120 mark is more intimate,” said Shea. Once you get up to 150 seats it doesn’t feel so intimate. You lose the thing that makes us special.”

Shea said he also felt the play called for a realistic set.

“It’s beautiful language and all that,” he said. “Hellman really can tell a story. But I felt I kind of had to support that story with this background.”

Although Lillian Hellman wrote Another Part of the Forest as a prequel after The Little Foxes, it was by no means an afterthought. As 2nd Story Theatre is making frighteningly clear, the Hubbards of 1880 are as fascinating to follow around as the middle-aged characters of 20 years later.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this production (through October 26) is that while the central characters are unsympathetic, either weak or outright villains, they are all utterly engrossing. Hellman’s skillfully told story, brought to life by superb acting and Ed Shea’s trademark snappy direction, becomes a play about family dysfunction expressed through psycho-logical gladiatorial combat.

Widely disliked businessman Marcus Hubbard (Vince Petronio) is the perfect role model for training his brood to be self-centered. He is sadistic to his sons, on the pretext of making them self-reliant. Having had to claw his way through an impoverished upbringing, he made his fortune during the Civil War by smuggling salt into the South and outra-geously overcharging. His relationship with his spoiled daughter is suspiciously affectionate, its closeness smugly encouraged by her.

At the beginning, daughter Regina (Gabby Sherba) is flaunting to her underpaid brothers, who work for their father, that daddy will of course pay for the expensive dresses she bought on a whim. But he would be upset to find out she is having an affair with former Confederate officer John Bagtry (Mark Gentsch). And he’d be apoplectic to know that she is madly in love and wants to run off with him, although Bagtry is kind but indifferent to her, preferring to prove his manhood by traipsing off to Brazil as a mercenary soldier.

Ben Hubbard (Coleman Crenshaw) is the spunky son, smarter than his brother but just as taken for granted. We first see him when he has rushed home from a business deal of his own, ordered back to his father so frivolously that the man can’t remember, so he says, why he did so. We get the idea that Daddy doesn’t exactly want his boys to get ahead.

Brother Oscar (Jonathan Jacobs) is a grown man, but he whines. He says he is madly in love with Laurette Sincee (Rae Mancini), whom Ben calls “that little whore,” to no one’s disagreement. Oscar wants money from Marcus to go off and start a business where her reputation won’t precede her. Fat chance.

The mother in this family, Lavinia (Lynne Collinson), is so ineffectual she might as well be called Old Mother Hubbard. She wants nothing more than to be allowed to go away and do missionary work among the blacks. Presumably because he doesn’t want one less servant in the house, that’s out of the question for Marcus, who encourages the general belief that her ditziness is craziness, holding the threat of an insane asylum over her head.

Much of what is impressive about this production has to do with the interesting takes on the characters. Petronio gives Marcus an internal rather than a visible glee over his making people suffer. Similarly, he doesn’t give Ben the satisfaction of seeing him lose composure when he himself is victimized; generously, he lets us provide the pain.

Sherba’s Regina could easily come across as frivolous, but instead we get intelligence behind her girlish posturing, which provides an important tension. As the hapless Oscar, Jacobs projects a lovelorn agony all the more comical for its seriousness. Crenshaw’s Ben is a convincing villain-in-waiting. (By the way, those two could actually be brothers, they look so spookily similar.)

Though written six years after The Little Foxes, this all takes place two decades before. By the end of the play, what will be everyone’s life situation two decades later is determined and directed by Ben. He proves himself to be his father’s son, at least regarding coldhearted ruthlessness.

The supporting cast is strong. Among them, Collinson as the long-suffering Lavinia strikes the right level of silliness without necessarily being stupid, which makes her later actions quite plausible. As Birdie Bagtry, Maryellen Brito finds a similar balance, this time between supplication and dignity, as a young woman who desperately needs a loan from Marcus to save her family’s plantation.

As usual, the costume design by Ron Cesario maintains the period mood through appropriate elegance.

2nd Story Theatre begins its 2008-2009 season with a captivating and close-to-perfect production of playwright Lillian Hellman’s 1946 play Another Part of the Forest, a tale of ferocity and greed that revisits the notorious Hubbard family, originally introduced and made famous by the author’s earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Little Foxes.

Written as a prequel to The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest portrays a slightly younger but no less wicked Hubbard clan of the South, ruled over by father Marcus (Vince Petronio), who earned his family’s fortune from shady dealings during the Civil War. He completely discounts his unstable, delusional wife Lavinia (Lynne Collinson) while projecting an abnormal display of affection upon his selfish and scheming daughter, Regina (Gabby Sherba). His elder son, Ben (Coleman Crenshaw), resents Marcus’s domineering control over him, whereas the younger, oafish Oscar (Jonathan Jacobs) expects handouts to remedy the trouble that always seems to find him.

Unwittingly trapped in the Hubbard web are the Bagtry siblings, John (Mark Gentsch) and Birdie (Maryellen Brito). Birdie seeks a loan from the Hubbards for her debt-ridden family’s valuable land, while the warring soldier John rejects Regina’s advances, wishing instead to return to the battlefield. Oscar, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Laurette Sincee (Rae Mancini), an outspoken, willful “lady of the evening.” Each of the Hubbard siblings had made it his or her mission to break free of their father’s reins, no matter what the cost or ensuing embarrassment.

The 2nd Story set is beautifully and hauntingly transformed by designer Trevor Elliot into the facade of the Hubbard home, where this colorful cast of characters gathers in pairs or groups for conversation, collaboration and conspiracy. Director Ed Shea creates a stage rhythm that illustrates the inherent emotional distance of these individuals. The cast impressively masters Hellman’s complex dialogue, virtually every word of which is fraught with meaning.

Petronio’s performance as the Hubbard patriarch is especially cold. Marcus is a one-dimensional man with truly no redeeming qualities, and the actor shines in the role. Collinson is just as chilling as Lavinia, the troubled wife and mother whose level of awareness proves to be stronger than her entire family’s venom. Sherba as Regina beautifully tackles the cast’s most challenging character; the Hubbard daughter is a shameless conniver, yet the actress manages to portray her as a young woman who can’t be faulted for not knowing any different. Gentsch is charming as the anguished John, Brito is convincing as the desperate Birdie, and Mancini delivers another lively performance as Laurette. But it is Crenshaw as Ben, the one character indelibly linked to all others, who leaves the audience with the most lasting impression. Despite a few line flubs, the actor plays the eldest sibling with precision and remarkable ease.

Another Part of the Forest is a thrilling beginning to a season from 2nd Story that is sure to please.

Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest is set as Reconstruction takes hold of the South. Greed and blind ambition can be mistaken for virtues in such turbulent times.

The Hubbards are the wealthiest and most reviled family in Bowden, Alabama. The family’s Patriarch Marcus Hubbard (Vince Petronio) made a fortune selling salt, at war-profiteering prices, to Confederate soldiers. His sons Ben (Coleman Crenshaw) and Oscar (Jonathan Jacobs) have reluctantly carried on the family business of running a general store. They have used their blood money to purchase land, businesses, people and loyalties. To the Hubbards, especially young Regina (Gabby Sherba) acquiring is a goal unto itself.

The Hubbard children are alternately drawn to and repelled by their family wealth. They all want to leave, but want the money as well. Hellman hints at deep dark family secrets. Mental illness? Incest? Treason? Hellman’s family dysfunction is juicy, entertaining, material.

Vince Petronio, Coleman Crenshaw and Jonathon Jacobs have great chemistry, playing out the inevitable fall of a father to his son(s). Petronio’s Marcus has no redeeming qualities, roars when required, while being generally creepy. Crenshaw has the steeliness that is required for Ben, while Jacobs once again plays a pitiful loser, as he did in last season’s Fuddy Meers.

Ed Shea’s direction has taken the priMary Focus off of Regina, a character memorably played by Bette Davis in film The Little Foxes, and also played Tallulah Bankhead and Patricia Neal on stage. Gabby Sherba seems entirely comfortable as the bitchy and conniving Regina.

In this production, it is Lavinia Hubbard (Lynne Collinson), the family’s marginalized matriarch that is, whether the family understands it or not, the epicenter of the drama. Lavinia is the keeper of the family secrets. We learn that secrets are a commodity as tradable as salt or cash. Lynn Collinson gives a layered, multi-faceted performance as Lavina.

The large supporting cast of Mark Gentsch, Eric Behr, Maryellen Brito, John Michael Richardson, Ryan Maxwell and Rae Mancini all give fine performances. This cast works well and are all acting in the same style and range, which gives the narrative the cohesiveness that it needs.

As Coralee, Lavina’s personal maid, Marilyn Meardon has about two dozen lines spaced throughout three acts. On paper, Coralee is a minor character in this drama. On stage, Meardon’s Coralee is opaque and mysterious and possibly omniscient.

Trevor Elliott’s set design is simply a marvel. A full-size portico has been erected in the theater’s small space. With multiple entrances and exits that lead actors through the audience, traditional stage direction has no meaning here. Ron Cesario’s lush period costumes are a perfect complement to the set.

Three acts pass at lightning speed. Director Ed Shea moves the dialogue right along in a rapid-fire drawl. 2nd Story’s production of Another Part of the Forest is a completely entertaining evening of theater and feels, at times, as contemporary as it does historical.