By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll

They debated not even using a wig.

That’s how serious actress Cait Langstaff and director Ted Kazanoff were about not trying to create an imitation or impersonation of larger-than-life writer Lillian Hellman for the biographical play “Lillian” at Payomet Performing Arts Center in Truro.

Who was 'Lillian?'

-She wrote more than a dozen plays, usually challenging injustice, such as “The Children’s Hour,” about two teachers falsely accused of being lesbian lovers; “The Little Foxes,” an indictment of capitalism, featuring three siblings struggling for control of a family business; and the anti-fascist “Watch on the Rhine” and “The Searching Wind.”

-She was blacklisted in the 1950s for her leftist activism and famously refused to name Communists she knew, noting “I can not and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

-She published three memoirs about her social, political and activist life, including “Pentimento,” part of which became the Oscar-winning 1977 film “Julia.”

-She was the lover for 30 years of writer Dashiell Hammett (“The Maltese Falcon”).

“The idea, really, is to capture her spirit, her force, her temperament, her drive,” Kazanoff says. “We’re not interested in imitating her look or her manner. ... It’s been done.”

That was “done” when actress Zoe Caldwell took William Luce’s one-woman show to Broadway 20 years ago and offered what New York Times critic Frank Rich called “an eerie reincarnation” of Hellman. The final decision here was to wear a short, styled dark wig. Langstaff, though, is more interested in employing her body and voice in various ways to express the lifetime memories of a multifaceted woman. Hellman became as famous for her politics and pioneering manner as for her literary style.

The differences in portrayal start with her age. While Caldwell was close to the age of 55 that Hellman is supposed to be in the play, Langstaff is about two decades younger. But she and Kazanoff are quick to say that no one should pre-judge her as ill-suited for the role because of her age.

“I think if you take an older perspective on the play, then you miss the interest (Hellman) had in life, the sense of rebelliousness, the drive,” Kazanoff says, noting the writer’s political travels to Russia and Spain and her stand against the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s. “Edith Evans played Juliet at the age of 65, and English audiences didn’t have any trouble with that.”

“So many question the age, but I’ve done my research, I’ve read the plays, I’ve seen the photographs, and the main thing is that I feel connected to her in many aspects,” Langstaff adds. She cites such connecting points as Hellman’s politics, religious outlook and relationships with men. She says she was drawn to Hellman’s spirit and vulnerability, and how she overcame fear and isolation with her rebellion and daring.

And in the end, Langstaff says, “Age doesn’t become as much of an issue for me as much as (my portrayal) being about it being midnight and I’m in this hospital after 10 days” watching over lover Dashiell Hammett.

Luce’s play is set in 1961, as Hammett – Hellman’s lover of three decades and famed writer of such crime stories as “The Maltese Falcon” – lies dying. Hellman reflects on her relationship with him, as well as on her childhood, career and political stands. The two-act script presents yet another acting challenge by requiring Langstaff to play other characters in Hellman’s life: “men to women, old to young, black to white.”

Hellman is the author of such acclaimed – and controversial – plays as “The Children’s Hour” (1934), “Little Foxes” (1939) and “Watch on the Rhine” (1941), but she also won a literary following and awards with her memoirs “An Unfinished Woman,” “Pentimento” (part of which became the Oscar-winning 1977 Jane Fonda-Vanessa Redgrave film “Julia”) and “Scoundrel Time.” While Luce used those books as the basis for his play, the publishing of those memoirs – as well as much of the writer’s time on Martha’s Vineyard, where she died in 1984 – were still to come at the time in which the play is set.

“Lillian” is Langstaff’s first one-woman show, and she chose to take up the challenge in part for the chance to work with Kazanoff for a third time at Payomet. (She previously has been billed locally as Caitlin Gibbon, but legally changed her last name to that of her father, John Langstaff, founder of “The Christmas Revels” tradition in Cambridge.) She rehearsed for weeks on her own, but when she got to the Cape, her director and collaborator pushed her to “go bigger and go bolder” with her performance.

“What Ted brought to the play is not necessarily in the script,” she says. “We’ve been fighting against the poeticness of the script. I could be up there acting out her autobiography, but Ted ... has been working almost against the script to really make her alive.”

Langstaff also savored this chance to explore a historical figure she was not particularly familiar with. Both actress and director acknowledge that most people in the younger generations probably don’t readily know who Hellman is – but say they should.

“Her life was as middle-class as can be, but she had such a wonderful sense that the world was there, the world was something you wanted to know about, and she went out and saw it,” Kasanoff says. “She was seeking to find the truth. ... That took an enormous amount of courage and that’s something youth should appreciate and know about.”