Regina Giddens is a flower of Southern womanhood. That flower is a Venus flytrap. In “The Little Foxes,” Manhattan Theater Club’s nimble, exhilarating revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama, Regina coerces, deceives, manipulates and maybe even murders. How graceful she is, how charming. And how carnivorous.

Hellman’s play, which sent the author bushwhacking through what she called “the giant tangled time-jungle” of childhood memory and family legend, has never quite held the stature it deserves. The Times review of its Broadway premiere ran with the dampening subhead, “Stinging Drama About Rugged Individualism Provides a Number of Good Acting Parts.” How nice. Is the play too tidy, too well made, too clear-cut in its morality to fight for a place in the first rank of American theater? Maybe. But it comes pretty close. And very well armed.

In Regina, whose individualism is refined rather than rugged, Hellman created one of the stage’s great antiheroines and a glide bomb of a role. Now, in Daniel Sullivan’s production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, two actresses get to detonate it. At alternating performances, Laura Linney (“Time Stands Still,” “The Big C”) and Cynthia Nixon (“Rabbit Hole,” “Sex and the City”) swap the roles of Regina and Birdie, Regina’s wilting sister-in-law. Regina’s is the flashy part, Birdie’s the devastating one.