Entertainment

Successful revival at Dobama

The time is now for 'Children's Hour'

By Bill Doll

Theater critic

Dobama has done something it doesn't often do stage a revival and it has done it quite nicely.

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The play is Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour," a dark drama of lies and evil at a girls' school that was first produced in 1934.

One might think that "The Children's Hour" is a dated work. Today we might not become so agitated about accusations of a lesbian relationship between two teachers. But this indictment, which propels the drama, does not seem dated in the least.

In the setting of a refined girls' school located in a small town and attended by adolescent girls from very wealthy families, it is the corrosive poison of the accusation, no matter its subject, that takes hold of us, no matter what the period or the place. And take hold it does. Leslie Varnick, who directed, has in-

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In Review

stilled her production with an almost shivery sense of evil. The feel pervades the stage like a fog, dank and threatening.

The personification of this evil is a sweet young student named Mary Tilford. Played by Ellery Siegler, with long raven black hair and skin like porcelain, this. Mary is like a character out of "Rosemary's Baby." She is one of those Ira Levin creations who are born of Satan, or, at least of a warlock.

This girl isn't mischievous. She is pure evil. With cool detachment; she picks out her schoolmates' weak points and uses them against them. One girl's fear that her minor theft of a bracelet will be discovered gives Mary's power to blackmail and control the frightened girl.

Mary holds some bitter and unex-

plainable grudge toward two of her teachers, Miss Wright (Peggy Buerkel) and Miss Dobie (Marjorie Newcomber). Mary hears some thirdhand innuendoes that the women are lovers. No matter that the innuendoes come from a silly, high-strung teacher while in a pique. The bad seed is enough and well worth planting.

Mary tells a doting grandmother. What begins as a child's petty revenge spreads like blood on cloth. Parents take their children out of the school, the teachers lose a libel suit against the grandmother, the school closes, friends desert the teachers and their lives are ruined.

This production is not so much of the big lie that overwhelms lives as it is of the mood that accompanies the lie. A whispering, sinister tide of evil floats about the stage. That is the heart of "The Children's Hour."

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The performers, despite à certain

community-theater awkwardness, manage to bring out that air of lurking evil an evil made all the more palpable because of the cozy quality of a girls' school.

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To say that I wanted to hiss at Ellery Siegler's Mary is a compliment. Peggy Buerkel and Marjorie Newcomber's portrayals of the teachers was nicely done, hinting delicately at the deep fondness the two women had for each other.

Lee June was the alternately doting and ice-cold grandmother: Tom O'Connell, as the school physician, seems the one island of sanity, until he, too, is tainted by the poison.

Joan Krops did an especially fine job with the lighting. She designed single spots and slow fades that effectively height and sustain the sinister mood.

Most of all, "The Children's Hour," is a good story. In Dobama's version it is a good story well told.