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"The Bad Seed" at Ensemble Theatre brings to mind the nursery rhyme about the little girl with the little curl: "When she was good, she was very, very good -- and when she was bad, she was horrid." In Maxwell Anderson's old-fashioned suspense melodrama, an anguished mother tries to cope with the painful discovery that her perfectly-behaved eight-year-old may be a sociopath capable of cold-blooded murder.
The little girl in "The Bad Seed" does turn out to be bad indeed, as anyone who has seen the 1956 black-and-white suspense classic will attest. Unfortunately, so is far too much of the first act, which gets off to a leaden start. The play is overwritten for contemporary tastes, with exposition so labored it creaks, and melodramatic dialogue that is often as stale as the cigar smoke that wreathes Calvin Knight's oppressive drawing room set.
But have patience: there are several nuanced performances, and it all pays off in a big way. Director Fred Sternfeld delivers a chilling second act that contracts like a cold fist around your heart.
With her blonde pigtails and a false smile that doesn't animate her eyes, young Betsy Hogg has some genuinely creepy moments as Rhoda, skipping in her hollow-ringing tap shoes and playing her piano lessons like an automaton. Cassandra Vincent has a strained, pale elegance as Christine Penmark, Rhoda's anxious mother. Both seem mannered in the earlier parts of the play, but get progressively more affecting.
As the janitor Leroy who teases Rhoda about "a little pink electric chair for girls", Charles Kartali energizes every scene he's in with a dark, gleeful malice: he's like a shot of hot pepper in a bland 50's box lunch. And Mary Faktor superbly underplays her drunk scenes as Mrs. Daigle, the mother of Rhoda's drowned classmate. She brings so many layers to her pain that her loss becomes staggering, and elevates the play from melodrama to tragedy.
The normally reliable Catherine Albers labors under a bad wig as the Penmarks' chatterbox neighbor, while Jean C. Colerider is a quiet bundle of nerves as Rhoda's teacher Miss Fern. As a mystery writer, Joe Kerata delivers his exposition with authority, while Mitchell Fields unfortunately doesn't move beyond one note as Christine's father.
The "secret" question at the heart of the play -- can sociopathic tendencies be inherited? -- isn't much of a secret in this production, and doesn't resonate nearly as much as the more pulse-pounding dilemmas that Sternfeld's production ultimately illuminates. How do you face the unbearable fact of child-murder? And what are the heartbreaking choices when you suspect your child is devoid of human empathy, and capable of behavior literally without limits?
The chills from those don't stop even after the curtain falls.
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