When Lillian Hellman's first drama, The Children's Hour, premiered in 1934, it won both massive popularity and censure. Hailed in New York by critics and public alike, it was banned in Boston, Chicago, and London. However, the negative reactions to the play almost comically reinforced the statements the work made about society: that man is too quick to judge, and more than willing to harm others to prove his own righteousness.
Set in a small boarding school for girls, the action begins when a spoiled student, Mary Tilford, decides that her punishment for cutting class is too severe, and that she will run away home and tell her grandmother anything she can in order to avoid returning to school. What comes to mind when she explains herself to her grandmother is a slander that is taken far more seriously than Mary could have imagined. She tells her grandmother that she saw the two headmistresses of the school, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, kissing and fondling each other. The two women are friends, but have never had that sort of relationship, and Miss Wright is in fact engaged to Mary's cousin, Dr. Cardin.
Mary's grandmother, Mrs. Tilford, cannot bear the thought that the girls at the school are being exposed to lesbian behavior, and rather than confronting the headmistresses to have the information refuted or affirmed, she calls each student's mother, passing on the lie. The girls are all immediately taken home, and the school is forced to shut down. When Miss Wright and Miss Dobie file a libel suit against Mrs. Tilford, Mary blackmails another student into backing up her story. Miss Dobie's aunt, whose unfounded, overdramatic rails against her niece planted the seed for the lie in Mary's fertile head in the first place, refuses to testify. The two teachers lose their suit and are ultimately ruined.
At first, it seems as if The Children's Hour is simply about a young girl who tells a lie. It is, however, much more concerned with the people who believed her with such little evidence, the cowards who were not ready to bring the truth to light and the lives that were destroyed as a result. Likewise, the drama does not promote the acceptance of homosexuality. Statements indicating that the school would have been rightly shut down had the rumor been true, and that homosexuality is a private choice that has no necessity for public acceptance, are never refuted. The issue is, however, one against which people were, and still are, ready to act with disgust and the fervor of self-righteousness. It is clear that it was these latter reactions that infuriated Hellman and not homosexuality in the least.
However, it was the rumor of homosexuality portrayed in the play that caused the greatest controversy. The Children's Hour was not even considered for a Pulitzer Prize, as the head of the drama panel refused to see it. This shows how much American literature and society has changed since 1934, as the 2004 Pulitzer for drama was awarded to Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, a one-man show portraying an East German transvestite.
Because of the wide spectrum of issues addressed, The Children's Hour requires a variety of talents and careful coordination to give each shock its full effect. Beginning with Mary Tilford's behavior, portrayed by Baltimore native Paige Hernandez, the audience is disturbed by the true capabilities of intelligent, selfish children. For this production, Mary is given more dimension as a person than she is in the original drama. One witnesses the results of untreated trauma in children and the raw confusion of young sexuality working together to form a darker but less senselessly demonic Mary Tilford. As an adult, Hernandez's ability to portray a fourteen-year-old girl with all the subtleties of disturbed youth is extremely admirable.
Many of the other child roles were played equally well by students from the Baltimore School of the Arts, all of them very effectively seeming very innocent, much younger than the High-School juniors and seniors that they are. As Lily Mortar, Martha Dobie's outrageously self-centered and stupid aunt, Rosemary Knower was pitch-perfect in bravado and tactless, badly-timed remarks. While these were the highlights of the first two acts, the third act, during which Miss Dobie and Miss Wright are seen at the end of their downfall, stands on its own, painting the destitute landscape of a hopeless life. As Martha Dobie, perhaps the most pitiable character in the play, Stephanie Burden's portrayal is glowing, first as a cheerful, witty, and vivacious young woman as well as later, in a scene of self-realization during which the only genuine tears of the play could possibly be shed. By the end of the play, the audience is left to feel angry and ashamed of human behavior.
Lillian Hellman's unshakable moral views, while evident in The Children's Hour, were most publicly demonstrated during the 1950s, twenty years after the play premiered, when she refused to rat out her friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee. She was blacklisted, but insisted upon writing a letter to the committee defending American freedoms and stating that her conscience would not allow her to endanger other people for her own protection.
Lillian Hellman wrote and lived to make people think and act rationally. To be effective, The Children's Hour must agitate and force each audience member to reevaluate his or her own behavior. Since its first performance, seventy years ago, Hellman's play has been doing exactly that, and through the performance at Everyman's Theatre, a valuable and provoking message continues to be delivered to a society as much in need of integrity as ever.
The Children's Hour, runs through Feb. 20 at Everyman Theatre in association with Rep Stage and Baltimore School For the Arts. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.everymantheatre.org.
