THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour is one of those 30s-style socially conscious melodramas in which essentially likable people smash up against an intolerant society and are destroyed. In this case the likable people are Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, the headmistresses of the Wright-Dobie School. Their crime: being accused by one of their less stable students of being lesbian lovers.
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Fifty-nine years later Hellman’s play remains remarkably powerful, in large part because it’s so well constructed. It’s tightly plotted like a good melodrama, but with a more relaxed story-telling rhythm and an eye for naturalistic character development–more in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen than David Belasco.
Piven has given Shattered Globe’s rich, multilayered production this larger historical context by framing the play with a pair of quotations from Hellman’s work–a selection from Hellman’s memoir Pentimento and a paragraph from her famous fiery letter to HUAC. In the wrong hands such a device might come off as heavy-handed, dry, or preachy. But to accompany the introductory quote Piven has cleverly devised a crisply directed dance sequence that serves to introduce the students at the school. Piven uses two more of these intriguing dance sequences during scene changes to give us brief glimpses into the students’ emotional lives. For instance, just after Mary runs away from the school the other girls reveal the primitive chaos lurking in adolescent hearts by dancing wildly to a Nirvana tune.
Set in contemporary post-sexual-revolution America, the play concerns a womanizer named Drew (Forbrich) who runs afoul of Diana (Rebecca Jordan), whose husband (Doug McDade) has a novel way of disposing of his wife’s lovers. I won’t reveal how, though I’ll say that he’s an avid hunter and half-mad dabbler in paganism with some eccentric theories about the usefulness of human sacrifice.
