a review

THE CHILDREN'S S HOUR

The Interplayer's production of Lillian Hellman's tense drama "The Children's Hour", which recently completed a three-month run at the Bolla Union Theater in San Francisco, has received loud acclaim from critics and audiences alike.

The drama, hailed as one of the most moving and vivid portrayals of the unveiling of repressed homosexuality, has set intellectual and emotional gears in motion wherever presented.

Miss Hellman, author of the theatrical bombshell, desoribed it as "a play about a lie and the havoe that it brings to the lives of the principal characters." This, in my estimation, is a very inadequate description of the drama, as Miss Hellman neglected to add that the "lio" (a false accusation of overt Lesbianism on the part of the two female school teachers around whom the play is centered) was not, in actuality, a lie! The motives are there if not the means for their immediate disposi– tion. The mind, in this case, merely speculates whereas the heart knows all along.

This play, born and nurtured in the mind of Miss Hellman will always be more than just a play, for the writer is certain that there were many in the audience the night I was present, and there will be many in innumerablo future performances to come, who will read into the drama a certain deadly but ever-present self-identification. It is for these that the play, whether obvious or inobvious to its author at the time of its first performance, was actually written.

14

Jann Miller