Financiers in handcuffs, millions in bonuses to executives of bankrupt companies, mortgages foreclosed, hunger and unemployment on the rise. It's the economy, stupid.

Is it a coincidence, then that two Pittsburgh theaters, one big, the other modest, are currently staging productions about the downside of capitalism, you know, the part that encourages illegal activity?

Downtown, the Pittsburgh Public Theater is offering a handsome, professionally smooth revival of 1939's "The Little Foxes," starring that constant presence on the Pittsburgh stage, Helena Ruoti

Across the river at Allegheny Center, barebones productions energetically resuscitates the 1984 "Glengarry Glen Ross" with another hardy Pittsburgh stage perennial, Bingo O'Malley.

While there is a handful of references to contemporary issues, including inadequate levees in New Orleans, neither play requires the present context to create an evening of entertaining theater. The real issue is that neither challenges the audience.

They are what they are -- cleverly crafted melodramas showing off the best talents of the playwrights, not insightful commentaries on America's socioeconomic state.

In "The Little Foxes," Ruoti faces a major challenge playing Regina Hubbard Giddens, the scornful and scorned center of Lillian Hellman's Southern Gothic soap opera of a fatally flawed family. It takes Act 1 for Ruoti to find the steel in Regina's magnolia, but once she finds it, the effect is harrowing.

Originated on the stage by Tallulah Bankhead, a true Southern belle, then in the 1941 film by an icy Bette Davis, Regina is Hellman's finest creation, an eerie foreshadowing of the greedy, prevaricating monster the playwright would become in her final years.

Like the other characters in "The Little Foxes," Regina is a stereotype, a nouveau-riche pretender to the society life whose honeyed tones hide the murder in her heart.

Although men set the wheels in motion in this Southern cotton town circa 1900, the play's true subject is the subjugation of women.

Deirdre Madigan's poignant performance as Birdie, the alcoholic abused wife of Regina's boorish brother, Oscar, embodies Hellman's version of the antebellum South. Heiress to fertile cotton-growing land, she's powerless, trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience.

"I drink. I drink alone in my room," she says.

Regina is the modern woman, unattached to her equally loveless marriage to the dying banker, Horace Giddens. She deserves a shot at the inheritance that went to Oscar and the other brother, Ben, a crooked merchant ready to close a multimillion-dollar deal with a Yankee industrialist.

She'll go to extremes to claim her share.

Alexandra Giddens, 17, is Regina and Horace's daughter. There's still hope for her to escape the suffocating, corrupt town controlled by greedy men. Lara Hillier is appealing and eager, but her thick accent borders on the "Hee-Haw" school for rube actors.

Hellman scoffed at critics who tried to find similarities to Greek tragedy or the earnest polemics of 1930s playwrights like Clifford Odets. She called "The Little Foxes" a dark comedy. Director Ted Pappas at first captures that spirit of parody and pretension, bringing an air of light humor and brisk pacing.

This nearly 21/2-hour potboiler, in a rare three-act setup, never flags.

But, as we know, Hellman doesn't always tell the truth. Her comedy sinks into bathos under the weight of her finger-wagging at the ills of free enterprise.

The play's title is taken from the Song of Solomon -- "Catch us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards." She's out to trap those despoilers through her well-intentioned drama, and that approach leaves little room for jokes.

The PPT is serious about this production as well. Designer James Noone creates the faded elegance of the Giddens' Victorian home with all the right touches, while David Zyla dresses the actors in rich, period garments, saving his most ostentatious styles for Regina.

The acting is uniformly polished. Although Chris Landis, as the dissolute son Leo ("he beats the horses!" and keeps a fancy woman in Mobile), lapses into overacting.

I also had a problem with Pappas' interpretation of the character of Cal, Regina's African-American servant. There's a touch of Stepin Fetchit in Wali Jamal's performance. I know Hellman wrote it that way, but Pappas needed to take a fresh approach.

"There're a hundred Hubbards sitting in rooms everywhere" who will own this country," chortles Ben as the play's macabre ending nears. It's Hellman's explanation for the Great Depression to come.

Audiences in 1939 probably agreed, but 2009's playgoers are more sophisticated and less impressed.

Chicagoan David Mamet set the theater world atwitter with his profanity-laced, heartless revisionist take on "Death of A Salesman." His salesmen deserved to die, the scum.

"Glengarry Glen Ross" opens in an Asian restaurant on Chicago's North Side and much like the cliche about Chinese food, you feel hungry an hour after the play's over. It's all cheap glitz and flash, contrived to the maximum like a TV crime show but signifying very little.

Mamet's dialogue, machine-gunned out by guys in cheap suits shooting their cuffs is too clever and funny not to like, unless you're from India or have Polish ancestors. These low-life slickers sell shoddy real estate in cheap developments with fancy names like Glengarry.

They're real men, see, winners by intimidation and phony promises. Like a sports team, the office has its faded veterans like Shelley Levene, whose wary weariness and fear shine through O'Malley's performance.

The star of the salesmen is Richard Roma, brash and crooked as they come. Barebones artistic director Patrick Jordan gives the character plenty of you-know what, a frequent Mamet body-part reference, to hold his own against "The Machine" Levene.

The rest of the guys are often eclipsed by these strong actors, although John Williamson as the office manager and target of the most foul insults in the theater since the Weird Sisters blasted MacBeth holds his own.

A breathless 90-minute dash, "Glengarry Glen Ross" leaves its characters and audience no time for introspection. But, it's not needed.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.