Sexual repression, grudges push 'Hour' to boiling point

Theater Review
by Hedy Weiss, Theater Critic

November 6, 2006

RECOMMENDED

In TimeLine Theatre's blistering revival of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour -- a taboo-breaking 1934 melodrama banned in Chicago until 1952 -- director Nick Bowling reveals the play to be a fascinating psychological thriller with a strong hint of existential despair. And along with the sharp, insightful revival of Another Part of the Forest (a prequel to Hellman's most famous play, The Little Foxes), now at Glencoe's Writers' Theatre, it offers further evidence that Hellman is an underrated playwright.

Staged at a time when the hidden sex lives of politicians and preachers are being unveiled on a daily basis, The Children's Hour considers the twisted roots of moral rectitude and how private grudges can be whipped up into a kind of mass hysteria. Hellman knew how suppressed longings could fester and become a quest for bitter retribution, with fear, loathing and lies upping the ante.

The setting is a small boarding school for girls trying to stay afloat in the Depression. Run by two thirtysomething women -- Karen Wright (Mechelle Moe) and Martha Dobie (Halena Kays) -- the school depends heavily on the wealthy Amelia Tilford (exquisite acting by Ann Wakefield), whose pretty but deeply troubled granddaughter, Mary (the ideal Zanny Laird), is an unhappy student there. As it happens, one of Tilford's relatives, Dr. Joseph Cardin (the most intelligent Sean Sullivan), also is romantically involved with Wright, and a wedding is imminent. This untethers Dobie, who is secretly in love with her.

As for the grandly self-dramatizing Mary Tilford -- a master of cruelly manipulative power games -- she is punished for behavior that might have involved a romantic tryst of her own. And in anger she seizes on a conversation between Wright and Dobie overheard by other students and leaks rumors of the women's supposed "unnatural" relationship (the word "lesbian" is never spoken) to her grandmother. Things spiral out of control, the school and its directors are ruined.

Bowling, who previously staged a thrilling revival of The Crucible, Arthur Miller's strikingly similar 1953 play about sexual-political hysteria, is equally skillful here. He expertly taps into both the eerily hallucinatory quality of the play's second act and the brilliant, emotionally charged natures of Moe and Kays, whose blistering performances bring a white heat to the stage.

There are winning turns, too, by Mary O'Dowd, Barbara L.W. Myers and a gaggle of girls (Mia Akers, Laura Noigebauer, Natalie Watts, Rayna Ben-Seev, Grace Parker and Olivia Cygan), who can be both funny and dangerous.