PERHAPS it is the prestige attached to being Dean of American Drama Critics that allows Elliot Norton, after reviewing a production and sometimes criticizing it, to meet on Boston's educational television, so-called, with its creators. Most reviewers would balk at the prospect, given the likely frozen reception inherent in such surroundings. But the Dean has not balked, and his regular seances on Channel 2 are a psychological, not to mention theatrical, revelation. In last week's, he confronted the three most popularized performers from The Little Foxes--Margaret Leighton, E. G. Marshall and Geraldine Chaplin--and told them a thing or two about Lillian Hellman's play. When it first appeared, the Dean recalled, there was a tendency to regard it as some sort of radical tract, to assume that the capitalists in the play, and therefore capitalism itself, were being placed on trial. But the passage of time had dispersed this epoch-induced, typically 30's reaction. Now, the Dean continued, in the bright, clear light of the 60's, it was possible to see the message of The Little Foxes not as a call to radicalism but merely to human decency. By the Dean's reckoning, this change had been one for the better.

It is with the profoundest reluctance that I take issue with the Dean's estimate. His assumption that the 30's climate served to accent the economics of The Little Foxes, and that the 60's do not, may be valid; but to acquiesce in and admire this development is to lose track of Miss Hellman and to underestimate her work. Simple avarice cannot have been The Little Foxes' overriding target, as the Dean would wish it to be, and mere human decency cannot have been its message. The economic metaphor encompassing the play is too grand and too well constructed to be peripheral. The Little Foxes depicts the passing of one system into another--of feudalism into capitalism--and the figures who resist the design of economic history are, to some extent, revolutionaries. Of course the line between liberalism and radicalism seemed less pronounced in 1939 than today, a fact which catalyzed this process of identification. But the play should remain, on one level, a parable of American social history; if this level has been obscured, it is not only through the Dean's polaroid lenses but through some error of emphasis on the part of the production's director, Mike Nichols.

The Little Foxes, in addition to being 29 years old as a play, is six months old as a production. The cast has changed--most notably, Margaret Leighton has replaced Anne Bancroft as Regina--but the director has worked closely with both casts, and with the present one in its transfer to Boston. So the gangrene of laissez-faire has not set in: the production remains under Nichols' control, and it remains alive. Beyond that, however, there is little to be said for it. Nichols applies a certain technical craft to the play, but nothing so purposeful as a concept. Anticipating reactions the like of the Dean's, he might have attempted to illuminate the play's historical pageantry, or to point up its underlying political bias. Instead he has opted for a kind of Hallmark Hall of Fame melodrama stirred into the hark-back sentimentality of I Remember Mama.

Even inside this restricted objective, Nichols falls short of success. An attempt to simulate awkwardness in the opening scene achieves only slowness. At the other interval when smart pacing could do much--the death of Regina's husband--Nichols throws it all away, so when Horace runs desperately up the stairs, the audience doesn't even gasp. Nichols, it is true, has a tolerable eye for blocking small groups: with 5 actors, he is happy; with 4 or 6 comfortable; with 3 or 7, resigned. But where it counts, with 1 or 100, he retreats stealthily into the confines of his aisle seat and lets matters proceed.

If the production still goes somewhere, Margaret Leighton, Richard Dysart, E. G. Marshall and Felicia Montealgre are to thank. Miss Leighton and Marshall aren't good but eminently watchable. Miss Montealgre and Dysart are both.