Mechelle Moe as Karen Wright ( left ) and Halena Kays as Martha in the newly re-staged work. Photo by Ryan Robinson. Karen Wright ( Mechelle Moe, from left ) , her fiancé Dr. Joseph Cardin ( Sean Sullivan ) and her friend and fellow teacher Martha Dobie ( Halena Kays ) confront the rumors being circulated about them by Mrs. Amelia Tilford ( Ann Wakefield ) . Photo by Lara Goetsch___________
Playwright : Lillian Hellman
At: TimeLine Theatre Company, 615 W. Wellington
Contact: ( 773 ) 281-8463: $25
Runs through: Dec. 17
There are two L words at the melodramatic heart of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, one of which is never uttered aloud. And while the play is about the malignancy of liars, it's the unsaid L word—lesbians—that got the play banned for decades after its 1934 debut.
The story is a tragic 1934 pot-boiler that Hellman ripped from the headlines of 1810, when a student at a boarding school in Scotland told her grandmother that the school's two headmistresses ( and owners ) were lovers. Almost overnight, every student in the school withdrew as the student's grandmother spread the word that a 'moral threat' lurked in the classrooms. The headmistresses were ruined financially. They sued the grandmother for libel, and lost. The school never recovered.
It's troubling but not entirely surprising that Hellman's play never argues with the notion that lesbians present a moral threat to the students. Instead, schoolmistresses Martha Dobie ( Halena Kays ) and Karen Wright ( Mechelle Moe ) pour their outrage at the fact that the accusatory student told a lie. One suspects that if Hellman had gone further—if she had used the play to attack the premise that women who love women are unnatural monsters as well as to expose the devastating consequences of malicious lying—that the piece would have never been produced. As it was, The Children's Hour was banned in Chicago until 1952, almost 20 years after it debuted. The Pulitzer Committee, apparently so repulsed at the idea of female lovers being broached in public, flat-out refused to see it.
Directed by Nick Bowling, TimeLine Theatre's revival of the drama focuses the villainy squarely on Mary Tilford, the spoiled, manipulative child who thinks nothing of destroying the lives of others for her own petty, selfish purposes. However, there are two primary problems with TimeLine's solid if unremarkable production.
The first is that The Children's Hour just isn't one of Hellman's best plays. It lacks the fanged bite and blood-rich depths of later works, such as The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine. The anguish in The Children's Hour borders thisclose to mawkishly tooth-gnashing, and the end seems more soap opera-esque than authentically tragic.
Also problematic is the key role of Mary Tilford, played here by 14-year-old Zanny Laird. Laird is adequate, but 'more-than-adequate' is needed to create the core of budding pathology inherent to a young girl blithely willing to ruin others in order to get her own way.
Even so, this is a production of edge and merit, particularly in the final act when Bowling abandons realism for a surreal nightmare of merciless, jagged white angles. The result intensifies the emotional pitch, creating a provocative, feverish ending.