This play was originally scheduled to be performed at Stars Playhouse, but when that venue folded earlier in the year, it appeared that I might not get to see it.
Fortunately, Bakersfield Community Theater took over the production, and did a great job with it. I saw it on closing weekend, so the run is over. You will just have to catch the next play.
I previously read another play by Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes, and wrote about it. That post contains some biographical information, including Hellman’s feuds with other artists, and her courage in pushing back against Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. I won’t repeat all that in this post, but I do recommend reading the other one.
The Children’s Hour is one of the earliest plays Hellman wrote, but it seems to anticipate the anti-communist fervor of the future, and the way that an innocent person’s reputation can be destroyed by false accusations.
The play is also daring in its approach to homosexuality, in an era when the psychology profession was newly pathologizing same-sex relationships. Unfortunately, we are still dealing with bigots seeking to suppress even the knowledge of human sexual diversity, nearly 100 years after Hellman wrote this play.
Hellman based the play loosely on an actual legal case in Scotland in 1810. I’ll discuss the real-life case a bit at the end of this post, because it is more complicated than the scenario Hellman presents, and fascinating in its own right.
In the play, Martha and Karen run a private school for girls, the culmination of years of saving, planning, and effort.
All is not well, however. Mary Tilford, a spoiled brat of a girl, who struggles socially and compensates by telling constant lies, retaliates for being punished (perhaps overly punitively) by telling her grandmother that Martha and Karen are lesbian lovers.
Unfortunately, the grandmother eventually believes Mary, and spreads the lie around causing the students to be withdrawn from the school.
Martha and Karen respond with a libel lawsuit, which fails. From thereon, everything falls apart in the fallout.
The play explores a number of questions, and Hellman avoids the easy answers. It is surprising to me that Hellman was criticized at the time for supposedly making the characters in this play all good or all evil, which is simply not true at all.
Just as an example: Mary is indeed horrible. She is a pathological liar, a blackmailer, an narcissist. But if you listen carefully, you also discover that her father committed suicide, and her family refuses to talk about it or even admit it. Her acting out is a terrible way to respond to her trauma, of course, but she is a teen child who is getting zero constructive help.
Likewise, although modern audiences likely root for Martha and Karen, and feel sympathetic to them, there is the question as to whether they exacerbate the problems. They are punitive rather than helpful with Mary, and filing the lawsuit only makes things worse. Karen then proceeds to throw away her fiance, the faithful Joe.
If there is any truly good character, it is probably Joe, but he, as a physician, fails at understanding the psychological dynamics, and thus misses his chances. He too treats Mary punitively, and then makes the unilateral decision to sell his practice and flee to a new place with Karen. Nothing here is bad, and his motives are good throughout, so you feel for him. But he too is flawed.
And then, there is the problem of the grandmother, whose actions cause the most real damage. But she has no easy decision. I imagine all of us parents would want to protect our children. While mores have changed regarding same-sex relationships, it is a difficult question if a child accuses a teacher of misconduct. How does one separate truth from fiction? Does one err on the side of protecting a child from a sexual predator, for example, or on the side of not destroying an innocent teacher falsely accused? This is no academic matter, given the history of moral panics that have sent innocent people to prison for decades.
I’ll also note that, from the lawyer’s point of view, literally everything about how the accusation was handled in the play was terrible. No isolation of witnesses, no care to avoid suggesting the right answer to a child. The investigation was tainted from the beginning.
Hellman also looks at how communities turn on those they consider “different.” In many ways, the truth doesn’t even matter. The accusation was made, and the seriousness of the charge mattered more than the credibility of the evidence.
What perhaps surprised me the most was that Hellman went a lot further than the usual when it came to the question of same-sex relationships. It would have been easy (particularly in the 1930s) to have just left the accusations as clearly false.
Instead, by having Martha confess her attraction to Karen, Hellman dares the audience to ask, “so what if they were having a lesbian relationship?” She challenges the very prejudice and bigotry against LGBTQ people by writing Martha and Karen as sympathetic characters, and suggesting their potential love is not in fact “abnormal.”
Beyond the words of the play itself - Martha’s confession of love - there is a certain amount of interpretation to be done by the actors. In this version, the affection went beyond the Hayes Code limitations that the classic Audrey Hepburn and Shirley McClain movie was limited to.
That, in turn, raises the question of Karen’s reaction. In the moment, the kiss draws a startle and a denial of reciprocation, but I think there is some ambiguity. This was definitely drawn out in the final scene - a pantomime of the characters at Martha’s funeral, where her ghost hugs the bereft Karen.
If you combine this with the way that Karen rejects Joe, knowing they will never again be together, at least hints that Karen’s feelings are more complicated that pure heterosexuality.
In the breakup scene, which is emotionally intense to put it mildly, there are further questions raised. Karen accuses Joe of having doubted her, wondering if there was something between her and Martha. And, to be honest, Joe is only being human here. He also only responds after Karen pretty much browbeats him into saying what she wants him to say.
But by that time, Joe has also already indicated that he fully intends that Martha come with them to a new life.
If in fact Joe has misgivings about the nature of the relationship, he has essentially indicated that he is okay with there being something between Karen and Martha. He either has chosen to believe there is nothing, or he has accepted a degree of non-monogamy. Either way, he is being beyond accommodating.
My wife and I discussed this afterward, and she indicated that she thought that by the time this conversation took place, there was literally nothing Joe could have done or said. Karen was just too traumatized and/or ambivalent about her sexuality to accept Joe’s acceptance and love for her.
In the end, the lie has destroyed at least three lives, and no amount of apologies by the grandmother can fix the damage, as much as she wants to.
Likewise, the cowardice of Karen’s aunt, whose fight with Karen triggers the idea of the accusation in Mary, cannot be undone. Her refusal to come testify at the trial leads directly to the loss of the case. One can see her perspective, I suppose. Being involved in a lurid case is no picnic, although since the aunt is an actor by profession, lurid scandal may not actually be a bad career move.
Bakersfield Community Theater has been on a roll lately with a series of classic plays from the mid-20th Century. I for one have been very much enjoying seeing these classics brought to life.
I did also want to mention that I loved how the opening and closing of the play were done in pantomime, starting with a school photo, and ending with the placing of flowers on Martha’s grave. It was a good artistic touch.
There are a few longtime stage veterans in this one: Julie Gaines as the grandmother, Jan Hefner as the aunt. As usual, they were excellent.
A number of young women played the schoolgirls. I will particularly call out Alana Edwards (last seen by me in BC’s production of As You Like It) as Rosalie, the main victim of Mary’s bullying. Her physical acting in this was utterly convincing.
As the only male character, Cameron Kovac carried himself with the good nature of the country doctor he is portraying, and made for a thoroughly likeable character.
Then there are the three main characters. Playing the villain isn’t for everyone, and playing a particularly unlikeable, entitled, cruel, and hateful child villain is even harder. Dakota Seaton simpered and whined and bullied and cried her way around the stage, a true force of nature and infuriating to watch. I mean that in the best way. She totally inhabited the character the whole time, truly becoming Mary. I was impressed.
Martha and Karen need to be discussed together, because the chemistry between the two of them is crucial. Done right, there should be just enough sexual frisson to raise questions and make Mary’s accusation plausible, but not so much that it distracts from the other issues the play addresses.
Martha was played with a certain frustrated yet confident poise by Ruth Luna. It was easy to understand why Mary drives her insane, why her awful aunt is a millstone around her neck, and why she reacts to Martha’s impending marriage with a horror she doesn’t even begin to understand until the end.
In contrast, Karen, played by Paige Green, was the gentler one, the one who feels deep emotions, and cannot fathom why anyone would deliberately hurt her. I must say, this too was an impressive physical acting performance - Green literally shook at times, cried at others, and poured so much into the character. I have to imagine she was physically exhausted at the end of each performance. (As a performer myself, I absolutely know that feeling when you left it all on the stage, used every last neuron and emotion, and put your own self fully into your art. It is truly exhilarating and draining at the same time. And you need time to recover.)
Our local theater scene is quite good here in Bakersfield. A lot of talented and dedicated people put a lot into bringing stories to life, and I appreciate what they bring to our community every time I experience their artistry.
***
The original court case:
As a lawyer, I am always going to look up what I can about a legal case that makes it into literature. This one had some fascinating things to think about.
First of all, unlike in Hellman’s drama, the original case had a strong racial element in it. The accuser was the illegitimate child of a British aristocrat with his Indian mistress. He acknowledged her as his child, and apparently the family - including the grandmother - accepted her.
Her experience at school was another matter, apparently. As the only non-white child in the school, she was relentlessly bullied, and allegedly singled out for punishment by the teachers.
Thus, when she eventually made the accusation against her teachers, there was more going on than a mere dispute over discipline.
When the teachers brought the action against the grandmother for libel, it went to a panel of seven judges rather than a jury. (Very different from our American system.) The trial was a shitshow. The judges were hardly unbiased, feeling pressure from the community which was already in turmoil over the racial and sexual issues involved.
The proceedings were kept confidential, and transcripts released only to select people and otherwise kept secret for years.
Perhaps worst of all, the judges were split between two equally patronizing points of view. Either they couldn’t imagine what two women could possibly do sexually with each other - this was the era of seeing women as asexual and defining “sex” only as penetration - or they couldn’t believe a child could make something up like that.
Oh, and also the “brown people are sexually corrupted” trope. Yeesh.
The aftermath of the trial, while it didn’t involve suicide, was tragic enough.
Ironically, unlike in the play, the women eventually won the libel lawsuit. But because of the lengthy appeal process, legal fees ate up most of the award, leaving them with a pittance.
Despite winning, public opinion turned against them, and they lost their jobs.
One of the teachers managed to reinvent herself somewhere else and had a decent, if somewhat impoverished life. The other never did manage to recover, and died relatively young, dependent on relatives for her support.
I would also note that in the real-life case, it is very likely that the accusation was completely false. Hellman’s version allowed for the ambiguity, which I think is a good version of artistic license.
***
Ongoing relevance:
It is interesting to note how little has changed in the over 200 years since the original court case. Society still persecutes LGBTQ people - and slander is still a major weapon used.
As in the play, bigots always use “what about the children?” as their excuse for harming LGBTQ people. Gay and transgender people are no more likely to be predators than any other group - and in fact the biggest danger to children comes from white, heterosexual males. Specifically, children are most at risk of sexual abuse in their own families, and in institutions where gender and generational hierarchies are emphasized - conservative churches of all varieties have had huge scandals in the last few years over institutional protection of pedophiles and predators.
Unfortunately, too many people are all too eager to draw a line between “different from me” to “a risk to my children” and scapegoat LGBTQ people.
Also relevant today is the way that many people are drawn to a scandal, and eager to believe it regardless of evidence. At least as long as that scandal reinforces their existing bigotry and tribalism.
Case in point: do you really think that the Republicans in Congress are blocking the release of the Epstein files to protect Bill freaking Clinton? Just saying.
This has, unfortunately, been a longstanding pattern. Don’t look at the risks close to home, even though those are the very real tangible threat. Instead, scapegoat “those people” and persecute them so that you can feel “safe,” even though that safety is an illusion.
I have many friends and family who are LGBTQ, and all this horrifies me. I want everyone to thrive and feel free to live their lives in peace. To quote Maya Angelou:
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.
In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.
We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.
***
My own life experience:
The problem with libel and slander is that false accusations can have real-life effects. Because of my own experience, many moments in this play pulled on some emotions in ways I wasn’t expecting.
Mary Tilford is a great character in no small part because of how realistic she is. True, she is over the top in the way dramatic characters need to be, but the core of her character, her behavior, and her words are all too realistic.
The genius of how she destroys people is that she doesn’t really lie. Not that much at least. Rather, she takes truth and twists it to mean more than it actually did. Or, when she does repeat a lie, she makes sure she is quoting someone else, in order to deflect blame and create plausible deniability.
There is just enough there in what Mary says to create the impression of a lesbian relationship where none exists.
By herself, though, Mary can only do so much. What she needs are for the adults to be her enforcers. She can intimidate Rosalie with threats of punishment from the adults for her borrowing of the necklace. She can ruin Martha and Karen’s reputations because her grandmother is a credible adult that others respect.
This too matches my own experience in my birth family, where an obviously false accusation of sexual misconduct against my wife became a means of character assassination and control. And it happened because the supposed “grownups” failed to address the lie. The Mary Tilford was protected, even if not entirely believed.
In the final scene in the play, I felt that there was only one thing that wasn’t quite realistic. From my own experience, the Mary Tilfords of this world (like the Donald Trumps they resemble) don’t tend to feel remorse for the destruction they cause. A real-life Mary may well have placed the flower, for show, but would also have considered herself fully justified in destroying that life. After all, she should have been treated as the center of the universe, and if she had, none of this would have happened.
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