“People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children,” wrote Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen on November 11, 2013, speaking of the election of Bill de Blasio to succeed Michael Bloomberg as the Big Apple’s big kahuna. Added Cohen, parenthetically: “(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)”
Worse—spoiler alert—the false accusation forces Martha to recognize the truth about herself. “I have loved you the way they said,” she tells Martha (the emphatic italics are from Hellman’s script). “I’ve got to tell you how guilty I am.” Then, to clinch it: “I’ve never loved a man—I never knew why before.” Martha is destroyed—not only by her latent lesbianism but by her repression of it. “This isn’t a new sin they tell us we’ve done. Other people aren’t destroyed by it,” Karen says to comfort her friend, but Martha’s having none of it: “They are the people who believe in it, who want it, who’ve chosen it.” Offstage she goes, and a moment later a gunshot tells us she’s committed suicide—the usual fate for queer characters in American plays and movies all the way up to the 1960s.
The show’s strongest scene is Karen’s confrontation with her fiance, Joe (Nelson Rodriguez), whose growing suspicion that Karen is guilty as charged festers like an emotional cancer. Tozzi’s quiet determination as she resolves to test Joe to the limit is riveting; it’s hard for an actor to cry onstage convincingly, especially in such a small theater, but Tozzi pulls it off. If the rest of the show achieved this scene’s tragic intensity, The Children’s Hour could be gripping theater; as it is, it’s a solid if uneven rendition of an important landmark in American theater.
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