"Another Part of the Forest" opened on Nov. 20th 1946, seven years after "The Little Foxes".
Regina's mother Lavinia married Marcus without love from the
beginning, so she wishes to escape. Grown in such circumstances, their
children Regina, Ben and Oscar have never known love in the family.
Regina has a plan to make her dreams of marriage with Bagtry, but
her older brother Ben has his own plan how to get the money he needs to
invest for Hubbard fortune, once he knows that Bagtry's cousin Birdie
needs a loan in order to save her family's estate. These two siblings
find themselves at cross-purposes for their plans.
Lavinia has a secret that her husband wants to be kept forever. She
is a witness to his sin. He has kept watching her not to reveal it
but......
"LAVINIA: You don't need half this proof. That's the trouble with your kind of thinking, Benjamin. My, I could just walk down the street, tell the story to the first people I met. They'd believe me, and they'd believe Coralee. We're religious women and everybody knows it. And then they'd want to believe us, nothing would give them so much pleasure as, as, as, well, calling on your Papa. I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?"
Lillian described in "Pentimento" she had always planned "The Little Foxes" as a trilogy, knowing that she had jumped into the middle of the life of the Hubbards and would want to go forward in time. She had meant the first play as a kind of satire and tried to do that in "Another Part of the Forest," but the critics thought straight stuff; what she thought was bite they thought sad, touching, or plotty and melodramatic.