THE BAD SEED
When George Bernard Shaw said, “It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid,” he could have been defining the word “camp.” Camp flourishes wherever works that once felt transparently sincere now seem transparently stupid. Quickly and cruelly, the camp sensibility transforms one era’s heartbreak into another’s laugh riot. (Just look at Erich Segal’s Love Story, a now-hokey embarrassment that only a generation ago seemed the last word on love.)
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In Cloud 42’s reverent re-creation, the scenery chewing is hilarious–inevitable given the disparity between the plays’ emotional cargo and our refusal to suspend an equal amount of disbelief. What’s remarkable is that the plays can still grip and persuade. Perhaps contemporary minimalism has starved us for larger-than-life passions; today only grand operas or rousers like The Gospel at Colonus can deliver the goods as grandiloquently as these welcome imports from a more innocent theatrical era.
In a decade that glorified domesticity and family “togetherness,” The Bad Seed carried a disturbing cargo of original sin. Some people, goes the play’s message, are innately wicked, cannot be taught to be good, and can only be cured by death. (Perhaps The Bad Seed can explain Leopold and Loeb, Ted Bundy, and Charles Keating.)
Wyatt and Althaus get tensile support from a cast who always stop short of overkill. Wendy Lueker is briskly idiotic as the psychobabbling landlady who sees nothing but sweetness in darling Rhoda. Peter Zahradnick is hammily creepy as the doomed handyman who wises up to Rhoda before anyone else. Kathryn Gallagher emotes up a storm as the perpetually soused and mourning mother of the boy Rhoda destroyed. Diane Zimmer efficiently depicts the mystery writer whose works unwittingly parallel the real horror.
Feminists might say the play condemns Harriet too easily. She’s just a bored, idle matron too aware of her uselessness to want to hide it, they might say.
