The Children's Hour
Audience Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hours plus 2 10-minute intermissions
Accessible Seating:
Hearing Devices: Not Available
Sensory Friendly Showing: Not Available
ASL Showing: Not available
Sound Level: Comfortable sound level
Noises and Visuals to Prepare For: Includes gunshot and one loud sound effect
Reviewed by Bradford Reilly
American culture operates under the paradox of tolerance, which states that if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will dominate—thereby eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them. The classic 1934 play by Lillian Helman The Children’s Hour highlights this paradox masterfully, and only emphasizes how terribly it permeates our modern, virtual society, whose intolerance of many factions of American life are based on lies.
The production of The Children’s Hour, directed by Lindsey Humphries at Mainstage-Irving (at the Dupree Theatre) gives us a meaningful night of theatre and offers us a moment to chew on the repercussions of the lies we tell, are told to us, and that we may very well want to believe in order to protect ourselves and to protect the ones we love.
A trigger warning: The show contains themes of adult situations and suicide, and is not suitable for children.
The show opens at a rural Massachusetts boarding school for girls owned by two female teachers–Miss Karen Wright (played by Katie Macune) and Miss Martha Dobie (played by Devon Rose). A class of schoolgirls mess around, distract themselves, or read aloud from Antony and Cleopatra under the tutelage of Martha’s elder stage veteran Aunt Lily (played by Jane Talbert). The schoolgirl ensemble (including Kira Trees, Riley Conners, Sloane Seagler, Lennon Duncan, Catherine Journagan, Emery Dunham, and Winter Duncan) are fun to watch, and the characters are about as unserious in their studies as they are in their care for each other. Aunt Lily, well-intentioned as she is, exudes her own sense of conservative self-righteousness among the girls. Immediately, there is a sense that each generation (young and old) and each individual has an idea of how things in the world should be and that the entire world is fighting against them in a quest to make it that way.
An hour late to class, Mary Tilford (played by Milicent Manning), comes in with excuses, how much she wants to go home, and tries to wriggle her way out of the consequences of her own actions–even so far as feigning sickness. She’s a bully and manipulates her classmates. And she is tired of getting caught. Milicent Manning plays this manipulation relentlessly and deliciously. At the end of brat-girl summer, we get to bear witness to the brattiest girl of them all as she goes back to school! Really–she wants to run away and go back home to grandma, where there’s comfort, no school, and dinners cooked by the Irish Maid Agatha (played by Isabell Culpepper).
And it’s at grandma’s house that the lie grows. Grandma Amelia Tilford (played by Nancy Lamb) has wonderful chemistry with Manning. Manning sells the comfort Lamb’s Amelia brings to Mary, and Mary never wants to go back to school. And so, she concocts a lie about her teachers Karen Wright and Martha Dobie that they are (hold on to your pearls, 2024 audience) lesbian lovers. In the scene, Grandma Amelia has been reasonable and level-headed, she falls prey to the lie because there is a possibility of truth, and she wants so deeply to protect the innocence of her grandchild.
When told in a whisper at Grandma’s house, there was a series of noteworthy design choices emphasizing the lie’s journey. Lighting by Mia Lindeman spotlights when the lie is told, when the lie grows, and when the lie settles, granting the lie a liminal space to thrive in. After being told the lie, Grandma Amelia begins the phone tree, calling other parents to withdraw their girls from the boarding school. The lights focus again, fade to black and telephones ring while a grinding noise crescendos in the background. I loved this moment given to us by sound designer Michael Cannon because it created momentum for the lie-that-could-not-be-stopped.
The lie generates intolerance against the two teachers played by Katie Macune and Devon Rose, whose characters have been friends a long long time. The actresses have a vulnerable chemistry, and provide good foils to play off of each other. Macune’s Karen Wright is buttoned-up, put together, and a realist. Devon Rose’s Martha Dobie is emotional and reactive, and is easily identifiable as a struggling outsider trying and failing to maintain the buttoned-up appearance of the other adults in the play.
The intolerance against the lie also drives a wedge between Karen Wright and her fiance Dr. Joe Cardin (played by John Marshall). Joe comes to help defend the teachers, but also sees possibility of truth in the lie. He tries to not let the lie bother him, but it does. John Marshall plays the role steadily, and with worried reason as the life he’s lived and dreamed is threatened to burn up.
The lie takes its toll. The lie gains momentum and creates such an intolerance in the rural Massachusetts community that it devastates the lives of well meaning people trying to make the lives of others better (even by holding them accountable). The play is famously tragic, showing that intolerance, when we choose to be blind to it, robs us of our own humanity if we let it and if we do not outright reject it.
The Children’s Hour at the Dupree Theatre in Irving, TX runs until October 5, 2024. If you have the opportunity to see this intensely classic American play, please do.
Sincerely,
Bradford Reilly
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