Review: Hellman's 'The Children's Hour' still resonates

Lillian Hellman's 1934 scandal-provoking, hugely successful drama, The Children's Hour, should be passé by now. But EgoPo Classic Theater's fine production, under Adrienne Mackey's vigorous direction, shows us that the play lives on.

This melodrama about a student who spitefully accuses two teachers at her boarding school of having a lesbian affair was written at a time when any mention of homosexuality onstage was illegal in New York state. So this is the grandmama of the Mean Girls/Heathers genre, only rather than providing nasty, guilty pleasures of the teenage perspective, it shows us real damage to adult lives. And although the shock value of the accusation of homosexuality is diminished today, there is still plenty of bullying, malicious gossip, and public shaming on social media to make this play feel true.

It is also interesting to learn, through the vehicle of theater rather than a history book, what it must have felt like to live then, and to understand, through listening to characters talk to each other, how different the mores and assumptions were then.

The setting is a farmhouse in a rural town where two young women, Karen (Jenna Horton, who conveys both a strong mind and a desperate anger) and Martha (Emilie Krause, wonderfully bewildered and saddened) have made their dream of a school for girls come true, although they are plagued with Mrs. Mortar (Mary Lee Bednarek, looking simultaneously elegant and ridiculous), a self-aggrandizing, overemoting washed-up actress who teaches elocution.

Mary, a manipulative, cruel, and reckless girl, is played by the superb Maggie Johnson, whose angelic looks - alabaster skin and blond hair - make her meanness seem worse. Johnson actually seems to be making her lies up as she goes. Her enabler is her indulgent grandmother (the first-rate Cheryl Williams), whose maid (Maryruth Stine) tries to help, while Joe (the always excellent Keith Conallen), Karen's stalwart fiancé, struggles to regain lost happiness.

The rest of the cast - the students (Samia Merritt, Kishia Nixon, Francesca Piccioni, Rebekah Sharp, Twoey Truong, and Katie Verde) and the creepy delivery boy (John Schultz) - create a world of palpable spitefulness.

Marketa Fantova's set design is evocative as well: how empty it is in Act Two when all the girls are gone. And because the audience sits on two sides of the playing area, we watch the debates and the quarrels as though we're watching a tennis match, our heads swiveling from side to side.

One of my favorite quotations is Hellman's line: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." And she didn't.

The Children's Hour

Presented by EgoPo Classic Theater at the Latvian Society, 531 N. Seventh St., through Oct. 25.

Tickets: $25-$32

Information: www.egopo.org or 267-273-1414