Old Play in Manhattan

The Children's Hour (by Lillian Hellman) is still, after 18 years, vivid and powerful. Into her tale of a child's fiendish lie that shatters tbe lives of two young schoolmistresses, Playwright Hellman packed a great deal of sheer vibrant theater. But for all the child's whispered charges of Lesbianism and her grandmother's shouted ones, The Children's Hour is something more than shocking, as it is something more than tense. Despite its heightened stage qualities, it cuts sharply back into life--to the monstrous power of gossip, to the sick, psychopathic nature of evil, to how calamitously the upright people of the world--such as the grandmother--can blunder.

For the first two acts--as 14-year-old Mary Tilford exerts her fearful wiles over schoolmates and grandmother and spreads her poison--The Children's Hour has the lure of mounting melodrama. It is with the last act that something at once harsher and more humane begins to blow through the story, and with the very last scene--when the surviving schoolmistress faces an enlightened, remorseful old lady--that the play takes on, emotionally and morally, a sense of the tragic.

The production is not quite all of a piece. Thirteen-year-old Iris Mann (The Innocents) plays the brat with remarkable skill, and more convincingly than brilliantly stagy Florence McGee, a grownup, did in 1934. And, as in 1934, Katherine Emmet is impressive as the grandmother. As the schoolmistresses, however, Kim Hunter and--despite very good moments--Patricia Neal display a certain lack of shading in their roles and of full impact in certain of their scenes. But if such limitations stress how much the acting can mean to a play, the whole evening proves how much a good play is able to do for itself.

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